anapoetics

"the problems that caused her to wonder"

Here is an essay by Adam Plunkett called "Why Critics Praise Bad Poetry."  It never really answers that question, but the second half reads like a (favorable) review of Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize.

Larson gives a clear image of her poems’ mystery, of how she explores like a sailor and builds like a craftsman and analyzes like a scientist, and of how she, as an artist, renders and deepens the problems that caused her to wonder. She complicates the ideas she offers most clearly, to enrich the basic mysteries.

"to hold together contradictions"

In a review of three recent poetry collections (posted yesterday at the Los Angeles Review of Books), Peter Campion discusses the ending of the poem "Torn" by C. Dale Young:

This is a stunning ending. But why? I wondered when I first read the poem. Aside from the dramatic situation itself, which is certainly powerful, what makes this so affecting? I think the answer has to do with a series of savvy formal maneuvers, which nuance and strengthen the personal testimony. .... Young knows that drama often works by taking one more additional turn, after the central realization, ....  [This] complicates the poem and makes it more powerful.