Dara Wier, whose poems I’m ashamed to say I’ve only just read recently (thanks to this blog), makes a statement about hard-and-fast do’s-and-don’ts:
I never thought I shouldn’t use abstract, Latinate words, but people were telling me not to, so often. That was wrong of people. It wasn’t useful. I never tried to figure out why people did that. I don’t know why people were so against the Latinate word and so in favor of the Anglo-Saxon word. Why was this one word apparently a better word than that word? I hated that notion. I didn’t like the then all-too-pervasive alarm: Show, don’t tell. How stupid that really is.
Jacket 40 (Late 2010) : Dara Wier in conversation with Cynthia Arrieu-King
(As someone whose writing displays a marked tendency for Latinate diction rather than Anglo-Saxon wording, this made me smile, but really, the rest of the interview is great, especially how much of it focuses on the different forms and structures Wier has used from one book to the next .)
Editions Of You 