News at Eleven: Instead, he approaches "what it means

to write a poem" slantwise, "by talking about a related concept. . . . Not about what poetry is, but about what we want it to be." This touches on what Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried calls "capital-G Greatness," and opens up a discussion of style. A style approved as ambitious, [David] Orr says, is "less likely to involve words like 'canary' and 'sniffle' and 'widget' and more likely to involve words like 'nation' and 'soul' and 'language.' " Our assumptions, he writes, "work like a velvet rope: If a poet looks the way we think a great poet ought to, we let him or her into the club quickly--and sometimes later wish we hadn't."

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Sympathy, celebration for the poet

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