Round One (mbing mbing!)

We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of texts and written poetry. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us, deadens our responses, and prevents us from making contact with that underlying power, call it thought-energy, the life force, the determination of change, lunar menses, or anything you like. Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text...
...Once and for all, enough of this closed, egoitstic and personal art.

No More Masterpieces Antonin Artaud

[Poetry] should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated... As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we can have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way. In fact, to read poetry of this totally adequate kind is to experience something bracing and memorable, something capable of increasing in value over the whole course of a lifetime...
At such moments, the delight of having one's faculties simultaneously provoked and gratified is like gaining an upper hand over all that is contingent and (as Borges says) 'inconsequential'. There is a sensation both of arrival and of prospect, so that one does indeed seem to 'recover a past' and 'prefigure a future', and thereby to complete the circle of one's being. When this happens, we have a distinct sensation that (to borrow a phrase from George Seferis's notebooks) poetry is 'strong enough to help'; it is then that its redress grows palpable.

The Redress of Poetry Seamus Heaney

as always, Seamus gets more air time.