Recent reading and writing about two complex bodies of poetry, those of Barbara Guest and J. H. Prynne, has brought me repeatedly to the question of the intentionality and organization of such work. Especially in writing about Guest I have relied upon...
"Do we--we who care about poetry, present and future--need nonacademic poetry criticism?" The question seems logical, given the migration (now chronicled by many academics) of poetry and its critics into the American academy, and the more recent decline...
Smile, if only from politeness, at the one moment of the world
that concerns you.
--Jean Grosjean, An Earth of Time
I The poet's psychology, visible only to the poet's friends, floats lightly over the surface of the poem. It discolors some words...
Will it never end, this prattle called Philosophy? -- Friedrich Klopstock Allow me to begin with winged words--it is such as these that first hum about the ears as soon as the conversation turns to the subject of Friedrich Nietzsche. They are still on...