Great Regulars: But it's the differences that reveal [Lucille] Clifton

to be a major American poet and cummings a major minor one. Where cummings remains a latent Romantic, Clifton's best work--in her books "Good News About the Earth," "Quilting," and "Terrible Stories"--reveals her to possess in her poems and her persona the presence of poetic poise in the face of discrimination, poise in the face economic difficulty, poise in the face of disappointment and, as the poem this month characterizes, poise in the face of sorrow.

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Poetry: Punctuated with poise

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Here's one place I'm staking out: I'm done with giving lip service to writing as geometric patterning. What Pound called 'vorticism' has run its literary course. It's tinny-eared, avant-traditional and, when handled by most poets, it's a form of infantile rote transcription. Like a key made from a copy of a key, it never locks or unlocks quite like the original. The poetry of abstraction, the poetry of the disassembled, the poetry of mass, space, and volume has become not just unmemorable but hidebound. There. So long. I'll remember the good times. We can only be friends now.

from David Biespiel's Poetry Wire: The Rumpus: Why I'm Quitting Ezra Pound

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