- At least 99 percent of poetry readers are critics or other poets or both. She believes that poetry is the highest art form, save music, and it is music, therefore it is the highest art form. For these reasons, it deserves an independent audience, of which she remains one.
- Line breaks make her feel self-conscious.
- A poet should never call herself a poet. It’s like being beautiful, it’s something one should recognize in someone else.
- Line breaks make her feel self-conscious.
- At least 99 percent of poetry readers are critics or other poets or both. In other words, 98 percent of them are assholes and often miss the point. One does not write poetry to be part of this school or that tradition, one writes poetry because one must. Wallace Stevens said that. Critics and writers of verse run around like someone else’s bad poetry is going to rearrange our world, and it’s their responsibility to defend us from it. Bad poetry is not dangerous—good poetry is dangerous.
- Line breaks make her feel self-conscious.
- When you take into account that there are still many readers of fiction who are not writers or critics—though a lot of these read crime fiction or sci-fi or romance or fantasy—still, the overall ratio of assholes to readers gets a little more hazy, and accordingly, she finds herself a little more comfortable with this.
- She was okay with Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Though, if it were up to her (it should have been) she probably would have chosen Ursula LeGuin, who was on the shortlist supposedly, OR Leonard Cohen who, as far as she knows, was not on the list at all.
- Line breaks make her feel self-conscious.
- Because for some reason she finds that a self-referential fictional narrative does not lend itself to versification. Yes, she understands that Homer and the oral tradition is at the root of poetry, and further, verse has stemmed from this, but still. The artist’s mind is, at its clearest, a mirror of the world, and so there is often a reverse quality to her own reflections about reality—not that she’s calling herself an artist (see #3).
- Maybe a more accurate way to put it is that language itself is the fictional frame for poetry. Thus, it follows that the language itself should be the only self-referential form for verse, which is, after all, the most primordial and sacred of genres. In that respect, prose too could be poetry, as any attempt to capture voice or style through prosody is in some respects versification. After all, line, while the prominent feature of verse, can perhaps in some cases be made more apparent in its absence. It’s about context. Thus, she would prefer to read Nabokov’s grocery list to John Grisham’s new novel.
- Because bare lists are suggestive to the imaginative mind.
- I think Abraham Lincoln said that (Bob Dylan said that).
- Line breaks make her self-conscious.