standard mistake

It’s common to mistake one’s taste for a standard.

bigger than us

Poetry is bigger than you or me and any of our predilections.

strong stomach

You’ll have to stomach a lot if you’re going to be a taste-maker.

tepid praise

I’m mildly interested in that kind of poetry, but not wildly.

epigram

His favorite artist is KAWS,
doesn’t that say it all?

thus said

A statement of taste spoken as though a truth statement.

silent salient

One’s taste is one’s tacit manifesto.

little to unlearn

[Basil Bunting’s] reading (meaning here his perusal of books) was not uncommonly wide, it was even more uncommonly exact and readily recalled. Always intense and personal his response to any writing was determined by the pleasure and interest it afford him. The absence of this factor makes the academic study of literature a hollow sham, its presence a test of character and truthfulness. Bunting’s taste was formed early: he had a lot to discover but little to unlearn. His revaluation of the canon was more radical than Pound’s and less erratic.

—Kenneth Cox, “Basil Bunting,” The Art of Language: Selected Essays by Kenneth Cox (Flood Editions, 2016), edited and introduced by Jenny Penberthy.

universal accord

Criticism tries to steady the jangly localities of taste by striking a universal chord.

taste and timelessness

How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one’s own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened ways through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn’t or no longer moves me. But there are, however and thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice.

—C. K. Williams, “On Being Old,” In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

acceptable poem

My poem was accepted. It’s perfectly acceptable, if unexceptional. The poem has mastered the secret handshake and matches well with editorial tastes. The poem thus conforms to the fashions of the times, securing its acceptability into the good company of its fellow poems. In other words, my poem goes along to get along.

taste irrelevant

The quest for a style that makes taste irrelevant. A style beyond taste.