ONLY POETRY ISN’T SHIT
‘Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game. Only poetry—and let me be clear, only some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn’t shit.’
Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Picador)
The Cold Tap Sings
the p-word
Category: Quotes
August 17, 2014
May 13, 2014
THE SONNET IS DEAD
‘The sonnet was obviously a most significant formal concept, for it appealed to the imaginations of poets in many languages in many cultures, but we can’t write sonnets any more because we no longer live in the sonnet’s world.’
Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana University Press) available here
March 20, 2014
GENRE
‘On a desert island, which strikes me as oxymoronic but the phrase enjoys, I believe, considerable currency, or maybe I confuse it with deserted island, which itself raises a question – namely, has the island once been populated and is only now that you are on it otherwise unpopulated – let us say then on an island all by your own self with nothing to read except one kind of poetry, would you select metaphysical, lyric, language, gift-card, or cowboy poetry?’
Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (Serpent’s Tail)
February 20, 2014
TODAY’S ACHIEVEMENTS
‘Is there anything you might do today that would distinguish you from being just a vessel for consumption and pollution with a proper presence in the herd?’
Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (Serpent’s Tail)
January 30, 2014
[LAND]SCAPES
‘Landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but instant by instant, incident by incident.’
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (Penguin)
The Cold Tap Sings 