4th
Elliptical Poets
“Elliptical Poets are always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory; they are easier to process in parts than in wholes. They believe provisionally in identities (in one or more “I” per poem), but they suspect the I’s they invoke: they admire disjunction and confrontation, but they know how [a] little can go a long way. Elliptics seek the authority of the rebellious; they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals. Their favorite attitudes are desperately extravagant, or tough-guy terse, or defiantly childish: they don’t believe in, or seek, a judicious tone”
- Stephen Burt in “The Elliptical Poets” from the magazine American Letters & Commentary
“Regarding the elliptical business, I’m less enthusiastic. But I do think it is a stab at authentication of poets who don’t belong to a team and whose work is reluctant to be either excluded or subsumed by one or the other, yet has sympathetic concerns to certain strains and not to others.”
- C.D. Wright in an interview in Jacket Magazine on being included as an Elliptical Poet
“Charges of being difficult are disheartening. It’s immensely discouraging to indulge — completely and wholeheartedly — in the capacity of language to create new images, new sensations, new perceptions; and then endure charges of solipsism, elitism, and self-indulgence.”
- John Olson in a blog post response to being included as an Elliptical Poet
“Burt’s definition is quite general in order to encompass the diversity of the poetry he champions, but he gets the mania and the declarativeness right. Also the relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation”.
- Tony Hoagland in Poetry Magazine
note:
good
