from C.D. Wright's "Provisional Remarks On Being / A Poet / Of Arkansas":

I consider my background, my upbringing, relevant to every line I lay down. None of the adjectives that can be applied before the noun poet can do more than crib, crab and contain the noun. Usually these adjectives go further--they dwarf and deform, they idealize, mythologize, and push the noun of its rightful solitary position. I consider myself a poet of Arkansas. If the ear is tuned just so, the ear can identify the source. Once, I wrote just so, naturally. Later, unnaturally. Now I choose when to, when not to. It is just another strategum though I came by it naturally.

Writ on 392 pages . . . Stanley Plumly's essay collection, Postumous Keats.

Cases made here and here for Francis Bacon as one of the most important artists of all time.

Allegories of Disablement.

from the LA Times
In a bit of poetic justice, it took a hit TV show to boost poetry sales. A book of poems featured prominently in AMC's widely lauded "Mad Men" sent viewers scrambling to find copies of Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" after the second-season premiere July 27.

Google reports the book of verse shot to No. 1 on its "Hot Trends" list for that day and is out of stock on Amazon.com. O'Hara rose to prominence during the New American Poetry era alongside Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder. The book was first published in 1957.

One of the excerpts used as a voice-over narration:

"Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again and interesting and modern . . . "

Presidential electoral projections for the statistically inclined.