—1951—
/ The Haiku Handbook by William J. Higginson with Penny Harter (1985)
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“I live in a culture that prides itself on how efficiently it kills people. Poetry is despised. It is frowned on like a disease. It’s easy to see why. Militancy involves rigor. Narrowness. Rigidity. Poetry is the opposite of that. It is a form of meandering. Of submergence and aberration. It feeds on anomaly. So that the forms it assumes vary wildly. So much so that the whole question of form becomes a problem bordering on hallucination. And is, ultimately, seditious. It usurps certainty. So that killing people with drones is a patent impossibility.”
John Olson / “Questions of Form”
“The Rip Tide” / Beirut
from The Rip Tide (2011)