Next Word, Better Word Quotes

“For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry

“Osip Mandelstam in the context of early twentieth-century Russia, his wife Nadezhda writes, “The poet’s mode of thought is the product of all sides of his personality: the intellectual, physiological, spiritual, and emotional, a synthesis of what he perceives through his senses, his instincts and desires, and the higher aspirations of his spirit. All these can be bound together only by some dominant idea which shapes the personality. If there is no such idea, one will have, at best, a clever craftsman, a ‘translator of ready-made ideas,’ a mechanical nightingale. The unifying idea can be located at any level of the personality—in its deep reaches or on the surface.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry