critic types

A thug critic, a theory critic, a thiswayandorthat critic.

thousands of lines of me

Its critical rhetoric couched in politics and theory, language poetry was perhaps the most self-indulgent of all poetry movements.

invitation to a voyage

The ideal place to teach creative writing is a used book store, says my friend Vava Hristić.
-
My hunch that language is inadequate when speaking about experience is really a religious idea, what they call negative theology.
-
Poetry tries to bridge the abyss lying between the name and the thing. That language is a problem is no news to poets.
-
A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved—A theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless.
-
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
-
Seeing the familiar with new eyes, that quintessential idea of modern art and literature, the exile and immigrant experience daily.
-
A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

—Charles Simic, The Poet’s Notebook (WW Norton & Co., 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss.

caged singers

The critic had fabricated some elaborate birdcages for his favorite singers.

eternal singer

Whenever I hear the personal I-lyric denigrated by this or that theoretical notion, my mind flashes on Sappho, and like Solon (the Wise) I think I’ll die happy.

the x-ray and the acetylene torch

Criticism is analytic; while theory is synthetic.

theory poets

Those theory people who have infiltrated poetry without the ability to feel.

don't flatter yourself

The theorist who puts ‘capitalism’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence (paragraph or book) is clearly delusional. Capitalism doesn’t concern itself with non-monetary enterprises.

template theory

He had a template theory to drop over any text.

in the desert of theory

Listen hard enough and you can hear prophet poets chanting, singing, raving out in the desert of theory. Nothing out there was created to hear them.

to usurp the author

The attraction of critical theory: One can usurp the place of the author without having had to produce a primary text.

arbitrary & capricious linebreak

A casual survey of contemporary poetry would lead one to believe that the decision of how/where to break the poetic line is either arbitrary or idiosyncratic. There is much workshop talk but little real theory or even practical guidelines to rely on when considering the linebreak. One could say that the linebreak is arbitrary and capricious as they put it in the law.

exposes, expounds, propounds

Theory at first exposes, then expounds, and finally propounds; and in that last phase it becomes an insidious enterprise.