Charles Jensen | Writer

I love how crazy this book is, how schizophrenic and obsessive and paranoid.

I admire small poems, their bravery and simplicity.

I praise the declarative sentence. I sometimes (as I do here) support end-stopped lines.

I acknowledge anaphora (“Giving Back”) and its effect.

I love list poems, poems that steal a form from outside poetry, and poems that make fun of the poetry life (“The New Poetry Handbook”).

I support litany.

I popularize and democratize gross overstatements that are ridiculous or paradoxical in nature (“The future is not what it used to be.”)

I am invested in poetry that is both funny and deadly serious, because my experience of the world is that it is simultaneously absurd and tragic.

I am a fan of simple titles.

If short lines were a Page on Facebook, I would “like” it.

I appreciate these poems are serious, but do not take themselves too seriously. I think this is an important distinction between sincerity and sentimentality.

I believe whenever there is a darkness, it hides a light. But that the light is still there.