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Poetry, the imagination, and the creative life.

Friday, February 05, 2010

The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, Adam Kirsch

I read this in a review at Poetry Daily. It is probably the most acurate desciption of John Ashbery's poetry that I have ever seen, anywhere. I am going to have to check out this essay collection:

'To read this kind of thing [Ashbery's poetry] can be intermittently stimulating; to read it at great length, as one is generally made to do in any volume of Ashbery's, is mildly masochistic'; 'This is not nonsense as a computer spewing out words is nonsense; it is, rather, an evasion of sense'; and 'His verse is less like an eruption of necessary speech than an adjustment of the poet's mind to a certain frequency, whose signal is then transcribed voluminously.'
Posted by Peter at 4:00 PM
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Poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T. S. Eliot

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Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~ Plato

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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie

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Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~ Novalis

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Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty. — Carolyn Forche

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Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. — Denis Diderot

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Sometimes something wants to be said, sometimes a way of saying wants to be used. — Paul ValĂ©ry

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