I loved this bit from Douglas Basford's editorial in issue 7.1:
Quote:
Wanting to nip "political poetry" in the bud, a colleague of mine at a previous institution was fond of quoting Robert Frost's famous dictum that poetry should concern grief—not grievance. There is some power in this line, of course, but it rings hollow at times, and even Frost himself, that great lovable self-fabulist, wrote poetry that was quite political—at times resentful of the New Deal, at others competitively anti-Soviet—though most often in an indirect or figurative manner.
The other thing, I have to say, about the aforementioned former colleague is that he was willfully blind to, blissfully unaware of, or perfectly content to know just how much grief and grievance he ended up touching off in not a few people.
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[Edited to say: Perhaps I should clarify--I took the second quoted paragraph as a timely and eloquent reminder that I should endeavor not to be that guy.]