Too much on to think about blogging, but I can’t resist a few words about a pet bugbear: the cliched instruction to cut out adjectives. It gets its plausibility from the fact that adjectives are so often used lazily, virtually as filler words to round out a cadence, or because the poet isn’t confident of having conveyed an impression adequately, even though he actually has done that without the overinsistent adjective. But you only have to read a few pages of good poetry in a variety of styles to see the absurdity of making a fetish of the idea of … Continue Reading