"A poet's work . . . to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
—Salman Rushdie

"The poetic art is no more and no less than the repayment of old debts to life and to the mystery of life."
—Vítězslav Nezval, in his foreword to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.  There are so many words, and they all mean something."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

A hand without fingerprints
still leaves a smudge
—Geof Huth

Here's our translation of the Xs and Os of this book cover, using The X-O-Skeleton Story Generator.  As we don't know the order of play, we read the letters row by row, left to right:

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

"[John Milton's] poetry acts like an incantation.  Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power, and there would seem at first to be no more in his words than in other words.  But they are words of enchantment.  No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distant near.  New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead."
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essay on Milton

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

The Serif of Nottingblog offers today's Tic Tac Toe-generated poem.