Waiting for the Mail

I just read a review of the new book On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell. I must have it. Here is the review.

The part of the review that sold me was: "What Maxwell calls poetry, good or bad, is different from song precisely because it carries its own music within it. Where song lyrics are written to function within a musical frame, poetry is framed by silence; it's always working against the void. 'Poets work with two materials, one's black, one's white,' Maxwell writes. 'You want to hear the whiteness eating? Write out the lyrics of a song you love … If you strip the music off it, it dies in the whiteness, can't breathe there.'"

I like this thinking about the white space as an active agent, the dangerous void with big teeth eating stuff up, the thing we balance against/above like a gymnast.

FYI: Do you know about the Poetry Daily Newsletter roundup? It's a great collection of articles/reviews from around the web that are of interest to poets.