[Norman Ball]

Does a falling tree make a familiar sound your first time in the forest? For those reading their very first poem, a cliché can sound positively inventive. Tired ears assail tired language. However I love Frost's idea about how immortality strikes the ear immediately when you might otherwise think, having previously not really thought about it, that immortality would take more time.

[marly youmans]

On that business about the work of time... I feel quite sure that there are Herberts and Kafkas whose friend did not save a manuscript from the consuming fire. And there are probably Edward Taylors whose work from centuries ago lies tucked and hidden on a shelf of books and manuscripts, perhaps to be found by some scholar, perhaps doomed to become merely a puff of library dust.

And so many people are remembered by a single poem, like Chidiock Tichborne... How can we believe that none of those stray poems have been lost?