Life & Wisdom Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin’s candor is its own manifesto: the “no theme, no sequence” posture sounds casual, even anti-curatorial, yet it’s a deliberate aesthetic stance. Coming from the poet-publisher who built New Directions by betting on modernism’s outsiders, the line reads less like shrugging than like refusing the old gatekeeper script. Themes and sequences are how institutions smuggle authority into taste; Laughlin instead admits the engine is preference. “Things that we like” is disarmingly plain, but it also smuggles in a key modernist faith: that serious art doesn’t need a docent to justify its presence.

The subtext is democratic and strategic at once. An anthology traditionally promises coherence - a map of a movement, a canon-in-miniature. Laughlin declines that promise, implying that coherence is often retrospective mythology. What matters is the lived experience of reading: attention, surprise, contrast. His only stated rule, alternating prose and poetry, isn’t an argument about meaning so much as pacing. It treats the reader not as a student to be instructed but as a body with stamina, a mind that wants rhythm changes. Prose can reset the ear; poetry can sharpen it.

Context matters: mid-century literary culture was thick with programs, schools, and manifestos. Laughlin’s method sidesteps factionalism while still making taste legible. The anthology becomes a mixtape rather than a syllabus - curated, subjective, and honest about the fact that “sequence” is often just another way of saying power.