Muppets, uh... Critics.

Critics par excellence!

    "I read the poems I could find by the critics, and I pronounced them not very good. I wondered then just what it is about critics that enables them to know so much about poetry when they obviously don't have the faintest idea how it comes about."
          - A.R. Ammons.

Ludwig Lovelace

    "Even to express a false thought boldly and clearly is to have gained a great deal."
           -Ludwig Wittgenstein.

     "I never realized how many lies you have to tell to sell a book."
           -Linda Lovelace.

     It is estimated that Linda Lovelace has sold up to 10 times as many books as Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Lovelace's book Ordeal begins with the wonderfully philosophical line "My name is not Linda Lovelace." If Wittgenstein had enjoyed anything (he evidently didn't), I think he would have enjoyed Lovelace's double entendre. It's a kind of pornographic version of Rimbaud's je est une autre.

Probably Prose

Armstrong at last month's Cascadia Poetry Festival

     In the seemingly endless argument over what is a poem and what is prose, what fiction, essay, lyric essay, memoir, autobiography, etc. Louis Armstrong offers this morsel of wisdom concerning his own art:
     "If it sounds good, don't worry what it is, just enjoy it."
     He later went on to say, "but if it doesn't sound good, it's probably prose."