At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.