“Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.”
Tip: press → for another quote, C to copy, S to share.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.