( via / via )

"...what The Best American Poetry really proves is that poetry in the United States today is the ward and client of a vital system of patronage."

"People come reeling and sobbing out of a performance of Romeo and Juliet; they quote the balcony scene with trembling lips; and you can lead them to no more poetry except at gunpoint. They have been faced with the abyss, and it has happened too soon in their lives. There could be a connection: because, as I have recently found, to be really faced with the abyss means that poetry comes into the mind all the time, as if darkness could speak. Perhaps that’s what poetry is for: to help us die." —Clive James

"Meanwhile, the old believers meet in back rooms, whispering their heresies: full stops at the end of sentences, em dashes unsheathed, even a semicolon passed hand to hand like contraband."

"'A blessing wert thou, O oblivion,
If thy stream carried only weeds away,
But vernal and autumnal flowers alike
It hurries down to wither on the strand."

--Walter Savage Landor via

New Forgotten Languages thread. I want to buy one of their books so bad—but i don't even know if they're real.