Poetry is Never Compromise

By: Lenore Kandel

Poetry is never compromise.

It is the manifestation/translation of a vision, an illumination, an experience. If you compromise your vision you become a blind prophet.

There is no point today in that poetry which exists mainly as an exercise in dexterity. Craft is valuable insofar as it serves as a brilliant midwife for clarity, beauty, vision; when it becomes enamored of itself it produces word masturbation.