If Plato came back today and saw the workshop, craft obsessed nature of poetics, he’d give his approval, but not for reasons poets might like: Plato would approve because the stupidity of inspiration has been removed from the writing of poems.
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And I Chose—All: Mary Ruefle
Picasso wrote this well before Mary Ruefle started publishing books, but if his words could be an egg, Ruefle’s Selected Poems would hatch right out of it.
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Rimbaud’s Last Revelation
Ashbery’s translation is the best we have in English so far.
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The Practice of Poetry
The poetry lesson is that poetry is a practice.
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Lowell’s Bedlam: John McCullough
All acts of observation are partial and reveal as much about the observer as the observed.