Stephen Burt Quotes

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

Color Theory"

How yellow the sky how little the understanding

Intangible the things we know for sure

Dusty silica clouds over Europe the very same day

We brought our baby home His second Too yellow

For comfort Too sleepy Just sleepy enough

For us to sleep ourselves That was last night

Today the clouds shift Outside shifts Rain and shadows

A mezzotint glow Then no glow Heart or soul

Exactly seven pounds of civilization

Hematochrome and skin and bilirubin

Yawns blinks and can't make up his made-up mind

The atmosphere can't keep its own eyes open

We can't keep our own eyes closed

How yellow" title="Stephen Burt Quotes: Color Theory"

How yellow" width="913px" height="515px" loading="lazy"/>

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend.

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate.