It's no secret that I don't like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry or its near relations, but the people who write it are correct about the formal (form is more than meter) and intellectual slackness, even vacancy, of the typical contemporary literary poem. Langpo is at least formally interesting and often witty, and its practitioners understand that poetry is more than just sensitivity, sex, and jokes—and I wonder if I've got that down yet.
But you can't make poems out of theory, either, especially mistaken theory. Despise the memorable line and your lines will be forgotten. This sonnet from Robert Mezey I have by heart:
EVENING WIND
One foot on the floor, one knee in bed,
Bent forward on both hands as if to leap
Into a heaven of silken cloud, or keep
An old appointment—tryst, one almost said—
Some promise, some entanglement that led
In broad daylight to privacy and sleep,
To dreams of love, the rapture of the deep,
Oh, everything, that must be left unsaid—
Why then does she suddenly look aside
At a white window full of empty space
And curtains swaying inward? Does she sense
In darkening air the vast indifference
That enters in and will not be denied,
To breathe unseen upon her nakedness?
after an etching by Edward Hopper
The poem appears in his Collected Poems: 1952-1999
7:47:04 PM 
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