Ally

“Standardization is a double-edged sword. It will slice you open as easily as it optimizes efficiency.

Any tag-and-track system we make standard will be co-opted to capture or kill free drones. Let's keep our mismash patchwork, keep ourselves inscrutable and inefficient. Visibility is a trap.”
― Ann Leblanc

“Isn't it weird that we have characters? Aren't characters just weird? Naming characters is such a scam.”
― Garth Greenwell

“Some poets have argued that the rejection of line carries a kind of political charge, just as poets once felt that the rejection of rhyming verse for blank verse or blank verse for free verse carried a political charge. This may be true in a particular time at a particular place. But it cannot be true categorically. For example, even if the heroic couplet was once associated with hierarchical thinking in the eighteenth century, it does not follow that the heroic couplet will always inevitably be doomed to reproduce the same hierarchies in our thought. The relationship between formal choice and ideological position is constantly shifting, and it isn’t possible to predict the repercussions of formal decisions except inasmuch as we might see them played out in the work of individual poets.”
― James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling