Tag Archives: poetry

Judith Kazantzis

Posted on November 8, 2018 by

Ms. Kazantzis wrote in free verse, her language intelligent but not didactic, powerful but not polemic. It could be witty, with traces of sarcasm. She portrayed women as complex, to correct literature’s pigeonholing them in one-dimensional characterizations as goddess or … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology, Quotations | Tagged | 1 Comment

Ottoline Morrell on T.S. Eliot, 1916

Posted on November 3, 2018 by

“He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous and meticulous.” (Quoted by Louis Menand, “Practical Cat, How T.S. Eliot became T.S. Eliot,” (The New Yorker, September 19, … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged | 2 Comments

Alex Katz at 91

Posted on November 1, 2018 by

“I was in the abstract art world, socially – they all thought I was really stupid. The poets all liked my work – I had some of the smartest people on the planet buying my work. I knew I was … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

More Liberties Taken

Posted on September 29, 2018 by

I puzzle over how the formal properties of verse help, or fail to help, verse. How do meter and rhyme support imagery and diction if they do, and why not if they don’t? I think rhythm and rhyme originally were … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Leave a comment

Liberties Taken

Posted on September 22, 2018 by

I want to think out loud about how poetry works, but without being too scrupulous about terminology. It just slows me down to try to re-research what the proper name for everything is. For a specimen I want to take … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged | Leave a comment

Feelings and Imagination

Posted on September 19, 2018 by

I once authored a proto-blog in the BI (Before Internet) epoch, an ante-deluvian moment on the cyber-scale of time. I was based in a rambling bayou city situated in a large, hidebound, arrière-garde, rump-facing state of the sector of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Soria” Wrecked: Meter and Rhyme

Posted on September 13, 2018 by

“Soria” by Antonio Machado, Spanish Poet, 1875-1939 From “Campos de Castilla,” Antonio Machado, Biblioteca Anaya, 1964. (English translations by James Mansfield Nichols) Translating into meter is a lost cause, but adding a rhyme scheme escalates it to a punishing lost cause. You’re … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthology | Tagged , | Leave a comment