Politics & Power Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin’s sentence is a small manifesto disguised as a craft note: he wants the solidity of “plain brown blocks” but refuses to let plainness become a narcotic. The phrase “American speech” signals allegiance to a post-Eliot, post-Pound argument about where poetry should live: not in perfumed diction or imported grandeur, but in the vernacular’s weight-bearing simplicity. Yet Laughlin isn’t pledging purity. He’s admitting that even the most democratic cadence can turn into a metronome, and metronomes put readers to sleep.

The “ancient” or “strange” word is the deliberate burr under the saddle. It startles not because it’s decorative, but because it interrupts a rhythm the reader has begun to trust. That interruption creates attention, and attention is the real currency here. Laughlin’s subtext is that clarity alone doesn’t guarantee vitality; you also need friction, the occasional little spike of difficulty that makes the familiar audible again.

There’s also an implicit cultural confidence at work. Calling his baseline “plain American cadence” frames American English as sufficient, sturdy, even architectonic. The foreign or archaic word becomes a controlled import, not a surrender to old-world authority. Coming from Laughlin - a poet but also the founder of New Directions, the press that smuggled modernism into American mainstream taste - this reads like a publisher’s aesthetic too: keep the line readable, then slip in the oddness that wakes up the room.