"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."
"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."
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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."
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"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."