Lumpy pudding

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)

Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!

Sep 15, 2011 2:59pm

Gunnar Ekelöf: A poem from Partitur

A bowl of eyes
I leave to autumn
Yes, a bowl full
of the unseen
For I have been granted
to see

The faces of the dead and the living
Human insufficiency
and the one thing needed
But of that
I am forbidden
to speak

I stand in Epicurus’ garden
There the laurel is in bloom
And the high gods
are endlessly remote