Wachtel's study of Russian verse, mentioned yesterday, makes it clear that even the Futurists, despite their brash gleeful revo-destroyo attitude, worked & re-worked their own craft basis, by means of response to powerful & popular works of the past (see his comments on Kruchenyk's re-do of Pushkin's ballad "The Black Shawl", in his language-game verse crime novel, The Brigand Vanka Kain and Sonka the Manicurist).

I'm feeling shrifted & shifted this morning. Thinking back to Hotel Point comments also noted yesterday (last paragraph of his Friday post).

No one can destroy poetry. But are we ruining it & spoiling it (or just missing it) by too much glib talk? The emphasis is on creating unique & exceptional alternative verbal spaces. Should it be, rather, on practice that tries to reach for the essential, the central, the paradigmatic (through careful engagement with tradition-as-craft)? Such does not necessarily have to be "serious" in a ponderous way (as poets like Kruchenyk show). But the power, the acoustic magnitude, of the communicative instruments of poetry - just as in music - depends on refinement, exactitude, and careful listening.