Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Great Regulars: The poem is brimming with cliché,

pat phrasing and store-bought imagery. After the no-s--t intro of "One sun rose on us today," Blanco stumbles through a inexpertly enjambed stanza of pre-MFA imagery before arriving at "My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors." When he senses his audience nodding, he deploys the unearned, inexact Newtown image of "twenty children marked absent/today, and forever" to oblige us into fellowship. This is exactly what Keats complained about when he disparaged poems that have "a palpable design upon us."

from Michael Lista: National Post: On Poetry: Occasional and terrible

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