Marjorie Perloff - Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.
- Frank O'Hara, 'Personism: A Manifesto' (1959)¹

Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
- Ezra Pound, 'A Retrospect' (1918)²


Public Perceptions

Scene: The State Dining Room of the White House on the afternoon of 11 May 2011. Occasion: A poetry workshop held ... read more

Frederic Raphael Slavoj Žižek was only one of the diagnosticians who rushed, with a satchel of words, to articulate (by which I mean write articles about) the riots following the shooting of a North London gangster by the metropolitan police.

Žižek is a post-Marxist, meta-Freudian cultural pundit. He began his analysis of recent discontents, in the London Review of Books, by citing Hegel: 'repetition plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident... but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding'. Sherlock Holmes said something almost identical, as I remember, but Conan Doyle doesn't carry Hegel's cachet. 'When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813,' we are reminded, 'it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that ... read more