Poplars and tentacles

Poplars by Donald Revell from Poetry Daily.
Audio by me below.
Hm. This one was hard for me to pull together and I have questions about it. On a broad level I read it as an environmental lament, on global warming, specifically. The most successful stanzas for me were S3 and S4 and I enjoyed the [...]

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amazing maze

Here’s a maze. The Hampton Court maze, to be precise. Does anyone picture the Minotaur’s maze as something like this — as a hedge maze?
Would Minos have commissioned the famed architect Daedalus to design a hedge maze? And would such leafy hedginess have been capable of imprisoning a raging half-bull-monster with vast grievances for years and years?
But Julie points to [...]

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Getting back in gear

I started this blog back in November 2006, with the intention of using it as a place to review randomly selected internet-published poetry, figuring that grappling critically with other people’s work would be one of the best ways to define weaknesses and build on strengths in my own. 
That was before I fully realized how, um, bad the standing of negative critique [...]

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More on, yes, criticism!

Negative criticism remains in bad standing. pshares blog reacts to Tony Williams’ answer to no. 4 of the ten questions. Check out the comments too. Most interesting but least surprising line: when you’re a poet as well as a critic, you run a certain risk by publishing a negative review.
As we said.
The discussion reminds that [...]

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The New York Times asks the question and spends a lot of energy putting together a critique of influential critics in the fields of Art, Books, Dance, Film, Food, Music, Music: Classical and Theater.
Any field missing, you think?
Some interesting generic meditations on the role and influence of the critic and if you are hungry for [...]

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Amateur web reviewing again

Baroque In Hackney comments on the recent hoo-hah involving online reviewing and the importance of literary criticism. She makes some important distinctions. Worth reading.

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critiquing and reviewing

Quick! What’s the difference? No-one need pretend they know.
Some answers at this discussion.
How’s this for a blood-curdling quote?
“.. with a review, you are taking your life in your hands by criticising what a poet has published as a finished product. Many poets have huge egos and will hold a bad review against you for the [...]

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Amateur web reviewers!

Not without its perils as an occupation, it would seem. I’m feinting and dodging around this one, am failing to take the plunge. Part of the problem is my life is so crazy busy I don’t have time to weigh risk-taking properly. And risk-taking this is, at the end of the day, I am finding [...]

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Grading system

How should I grade the poems I look at here? If this blog had more than one reader I could open the question up to competition, but as it is, I will just have to allow the question to percolate slowly in my brain, ever so slowly, over the next many many many days. We’ll [...]

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This blog’s name

A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste. – Whitney Balliet

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