Fear is the coriolis force we never notice and
always correct for unconsciously in our trajectories.
It is visible in its effects, most conspicuously in the
magic rituals that proliferate and mean nothing. Without
television's reassurance, there would be a panic.

"...Outside my window, a small tit bird bashes itself
against the glass. At first I thought
it was admiring itself in the window.
Now I know it's mad." --Gwendolyn MacEwen, 'There
is No Place to Hide'

"...I'm sure half the words you and I are using today will
disappear in fifty years." --Galway Kinnell, in: American
Poetry Observed (1977)

"He [Ulrich von Liechtenstein, 1198-1275] performed
fantastic exploits in the service of his first mistress and
another lady, including the celebrated expedition as
Vrowe Venus, when, dressed in womanly attire, with
two long plaits, he rose from the sea near Venice, proceeding
through Frivli, Carinthia, Styria, and Austria as far as the
Bohemian border, challenging all comers.
  His poetry enshrines the classic conventions
of the service of love and shows considerable technical
virtuosity in the use of rhyme." --Poets of the Minnesang

"A hardcover book is considered a best-seller if fifty
thousand people buy it, but a record that sells fifty thousand
copies is considered a flop." --Creative Careers, Blake &
Bly

'...poetry is like the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics
in its ability to express every sensation of sweetness or
bitterness, beatitude or horror, by coupling a certain noun with
a certain adjective, in anaogy or contrast...' --Baudelaire, Draft
of a Preface

"...psychoanalysis is a kind of Imagism--a way of getting the
images to make emotions more precise." --James Hillman,
Inter Views

"In the apocalyptic climate of the 1940's Robert Lowell became
the leading poet of his generation. He wrote as if poetry were
still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought
to be perpetuated." --F W Depee

John Clute on the "hard SF renaissance".