Monday, June 02, 2008

your rhymed 14-line fly is open

From the notebooks of poet Winfield Townley Scott:

"A man may write a poem with his fly blatantly open--but the blatancy must not be in the poem."

And: "Oh, it appears too that there are those who maintain that the typewriter influences--or should influence--the length of the poetic line. God knows in what way or why."

Source: "a dirty hand": The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott (Texas, 1969), p. 157.