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The Virtual World

Poetry, the imagination, and the creative life.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Interesting NY Times Poetry Chronicle, with brief review by Jeff Gordinier of new books from Michael Dickman, C Dale Young, and others:

Frank O’Hara once wrote this, in a poem called “Poetry”: “The only way to be quiet / is to be quick, so I scare / you clumsily, or surprise / you with a stab.” It’s an instructive passage, not just because it moves with that conversational, come-bounce-along-with-me rhythm that became O’Hara’s signature, but because it’s a poem about the odd, lovely jolt we can get from an unexpected line. In a way, O’Hara was going straight at something that has become a core quandary of contemporary poetry: How, in a texting, tweeting age that finds us drowning in freshets of language, do you deliver that stab of surprise?

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Where is summer? I really want to know. When is it coming?

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Posted by Peter at 9:04 AM
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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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