Thursday 28 December 2006

Criticism of Poetry

Lyric criticism. The ideal of a poem as a brief text that must be unpacked into much greater verbiage by the critic. Platonic form: the haiku that generates Gibbon’s-Decline-quantities of prose exposition. Like an airbag; or one of those inflatable life rafts that explodes into stiffness and into which dozens of survivors can wriggle. As if literary criticism were a form of explosion inflation …

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