"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

It's a book of statements by poets about poetry. I've added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me" (John Heath-Stubbs)
• "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh)
• "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine)
• "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas)
• "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam)
• "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams)
• "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams)
• "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams)
• "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue)

Fleeting gone

The link I had to a poem in Fleeting has gone dead, so I'll reprint it here -

The Gallery Affair Then I see her, the girl of my crutched dreams - Mona Lisa smoking a pipe that's not a pipe, sipping absinthe from a fur-lined cup that tickles her moustache. We miss the train that leaves the fireplace, but anyway it's raining businessmen so we stay in, smooch to the Broadway Boogie Woogie, sleeping in this tent with en-suite Mutt urinal. We've learnt our lessons. Abstraction came too easy for Brancusi, the universe already constipated with objects. He fed his 2 white dogs lettuce floating in milk. Schiele was more realistic - he couldn't afford the paint, he said, when the judge who burnt his work in public asked why he chose models with amputated feet. Our millennium opened late for staff training. By the time we wake to Turner's blazing sunrise, it's all on video, our taut bodies reviewed as allusive symbols of when beauty was freer than porn, though the cafe's a rip-off and the Impressionists' cheap pigments are fading in the light, irreplaceable as our love, the frame and signed canvas statements in themselves.