Quote of the Day

Politics seems a realm of power and persuasion that would like to subsume poetry…under its mantle, for whatever noble or base motives. Yet if poetry is to function—politically—with integrity, it must resist such appeals as certainly as it resists others…Poetry seems a making within discrete temporal conditions, and I would happily dispense with the word “creative.” Poetry is profoundly mediational and relative and exists as a form of address singularly difficult to prescribe or define.

A poet’s political responsibility is human, like that of a cabinetmaker or machinist, and his or her activity is subject to similar examinations.

—Michael Palmer, “The Flower of Capital”