J. V. Cunningham Quotes

Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out.

Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.

What demon is our god? What name subsumes That act external to our sleeping selves? Not pleasure — it is much too broad and narrow —, Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride, And not in prowess, but pride undefined, Autonomous in its unthought demands, A bit of vanity, but mostly pride.

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained

Grief restrains grief as dams torrential rain And time grows fertile with extended pain

An old dissembler who lived out his lie Lies here as if he did not fear to die.

She said he was a man who cheated. He said she didn't play the game. She said an expletive deleted. He said the undeleted same. And so they ended their relation With meaningful communication.

Despise me not And not be queasy To praise somewhat Verse is not easy

With an a natural affinity for the epigram genre, I am, so to speak, a short breathed man and have an almost unthoughtout preference for brief definitive statements.

What is needed is a noticeable unnoticeable style,... a directness of speech that seems to one judging easily imitable, to one trying it nothing less so.