"One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up."
"In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others."
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Source: Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press
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"Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend."
"In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet who would want to write or perform for most recent inauguration. I'd be very surprised if there were an inaugural poem, and I can't really imagine what that would be."
"Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back."
"Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset."
"To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical."