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It is spooky you mentioning diamonds because I was thinking today that that elusive quality of perfection in a poem is sometimes at least to do with a certain crystalline order to things.
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I think of Tim's best poems as diamond-like: compressed, tiny, hard, every word in its place, its only place, where only that word could go. And then there's this by A. R. Ammons:
Small Song
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away
Its polar opposite might be this one by W. F. Roby, which I also like very much:
http://www.umbrellajournal.com/fall2.../W.F.Roby.html
but I don't think of it as "perfect" because it's so messy. But life is messy. Dostoyevsky was a messy writer. Agh, I don't know what's best. I want it all!
p.s. Can I invoke Mark too? Mark, do you remember something D. H. Lawrence said about there being two kinds of poems, the gemlike kind, and those that are like a scrap of life snatched as it passes by?
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