pretend no one will see

She had recently turned seventy, which may have been weighing on her more than she thought. Many friends she would show her work to are dead, she'd noticed lately. “So it’s like, who cares? You have to have someone waiting for you.” And readers? “If I think about them, I can’t write anything. When I write a poem, I have to pretend no one will see it.”

I asked what emotion was most productive for her work—sadness? happiness? “Loneliness,” she answered quickly.

Her best writing comes when, she said, she is “in my nightgown for days, not thinking about anyone else. It takes a couple of days just thrashing through the brambles to get to any type of clearing, and it’s very painful. It’s frustrating, you see all your limitations, but a lot of what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you if you mean it. I like it once I settle in, but the borders are tough.” Once she passes into the other state, “that’s the best feeling in the world—we’re utterly ourselves and we’re nobody.”

Marie Howe being quoted in The Work of Art: how something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

not much

How much I love a poem made by the least means.

the way in

In poetry, surprise is often a matter of perspective.

not seen

Poet, strive for the scene unseen.

fail to fly

Poets feather themselves with their chapbooks and books, but few lift off.

my break

James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, the book that hooked me on poetry.

only sincerity

In brief, Manet was liberal and a humanitarian. He was a refined and cultivated man of the world, and it would be a mistake to think that his hunger for recognition (which was always bitterly disappointed) was a mere character trait. When presenting his personal exhibition in 1867, he wrote: “It is only sincerity that gives my work a character that could seem to be one of protest. In fact, the artist has tried only to express his impressions. He has no desire to overturn tradition or to create a new kind of painting. He has simply tried to be himself, and not someone else…”
[…]
From beginning to end, Manet’s life was really an impassioned affirmation of a single right—that of expressing a world of feelings that he had really experienced. The refined “dandy” who was full of irony and scepticism, and who loved the superficiality of life on the boulevards, became terribly serious when anyone mentioned his art. Manet’s attitude and the domineering way in which he expressed his ideas about painting needed to be justified by exceptional novelty and clarity of vision, and that he was justified is abundantly shown by the influence that his ideas have had on all art since his time. “Manet was the first,” Matisse wrote, “to work by reflexes and thus simplify the painter’s task…expressing only what affected his senses and feelings immediately.”

—Dario Durbe, Edouard Manet (Premier Book, Oldbourne Book Co. Ltd., 1963)

fill 'er up

It was one of those long texts meant for those who need something to fill the blank spaces of their lives.

out of place

I found one of his poems slumming in an obscure little magazine.

store of value

Poetry is a lot like Bitcoin: It’s worth a lot to those who value it, and not much to anyone else.

device and artifice

A poet who used more devices than MacGyver.

architecture without lines

Claude Monet on his Rouen Cathedral series…

When the British painter Wynford Dewhurst asked for an account of the Rouen pictures, Monet replied, ‘I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.’
[…]
‘I have wanted to do architecture without doing its features, without the lines.’

Quoted in Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Knopf, 2024)

sad parade

Poets and social media: a parade of narcissistic self-promotion.

poets refuse

Poets refuse to be discouraged.

poesy not poetry

Some poets are still writing ‘poesy’, not poetry.

one and done

The saddest thing I could say about the poet was that no poem of his/hers I’d read impelled me to read it again.

what words are

The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas, but they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts—just as a melody which, though it may be associated with a conceptual meaning, cannot be described by words or by any other medium of expression. And it is just that irrational quality which stirs up our deepest feelings, elevates our innermost being, and makes it vibrate with others.

The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined therewith. It is stronger than what the words convey objectively—stronger even than reason with all its logic, in which we believe so firmly...

If art can be called the re-creation and formal expression of reality through the medium of human experience, then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art. Each word originally was a focus of energies, in which the transformation of reality into the vibrations of the human voicethe&mash;vital expression of the human soul—took place.

—Lama Angarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (Rider & Co., 1960), no translator given

few wins

One wishes more poets took to heart the Latin motto: "Non multa sed bona," not many, but good.

shadow workforce

America doesn’t know how many really good poets it has, doing fine work in the shadows, without public attention.

published poet

When someone refers to themselves as a ‘published poet’, their writing is likely at a very low level.

rough going

A gritty poetics.

burned library

Such was his erudition that when he died it felt like a great library had burned.

[Thinking of Borges]

let's get lost

From the start of this poem you could hear Chet singing from the backseat, Let’s Get Lost…

drawn to poetry

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

—George Sand, The Devil's Pool (1846)

first to last

From the first line you couldn’t have foreseen the last.

innovative v. novel

Is the work innovative, an improvement of the art, or merely novel, different in a way that makes little difference to the art?

stay cool

Poet, learn to make no great claim.

break felt

Let the line break where it may, where it wants to break.

cards play themselves

That last line, lay it down like a full house or straight flush.

least made first

Their art so undervalued, poets act as though the world can’t do without their work.

higher speech

A poet of resplendent rhetoric.

[Thinking of Wallace Stevens]

flowers are few

Much that charms is small and fleeting
To the greatness of eternity.
The earth is a tiny shadow tottering on the edge of death;
The moon is a throb of splendor in the heart of the night;
And the stars are ephemera in the long gaze of God.
So grieve not
That your poems are the cool, fresh grass of a short summer;
The flowers are few.

—Pascal D’Angelo, last eight lines of “To Some Modern Poets,” Of Clouds and Mists: The Collected Poems (Sublunary Editions, 2024), with an introduction and Notes by Dennis Barone

different kinds of poets

There are poets who make poems and poets who receive and record them.

situational awareness

A poet should have the observational skills of a Jason Bourne.

recalling past voices

A poem…has the power to remind poet and reader alike of things they have read and heard. Also—and this is partly why the subject is so complex—it has the power to remind them of things that they have not read and heard, but that have been read and heard by others whom they have read and heard.

Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:

            through infusion sweet
     Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
     I follow here the footing of thy feet.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.

—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)

all of a piece

He wrote the same poem in a thousand versions.

book before horse

Poets more concerned over publications than whether they’re read.

filled out the form

The worse kind of poem is one that wouldn’t exist except to fill out a form.

more is bore

Some poets write two or more poems of the same type or theme within one poem.

don't abide

Hard to abide poets who abide only one kind of poetry.

markson notes

Because Theodore Roosevelt’s son was enamored with the poetry of E.A. Robinson, then President Roosevelt arranged for Robinson, who was destitute at the time, a job at the New York Customs House. A sinecure that allowed Robinson the means and the time to compose his verses.

Knowing that T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, visitors looking for his childhood home are surprised to find only a parking lot where the row house had been on Locust Street: The Waste Land.

Franz Kafka finished his story “A Hunger Artist” while dying from starvation due to complications caused by laryngeal tuberculosis.

bang-bang

Poet, bang it out.

signal plus noise

From the standpoint of information theory, poetry may contain a good deal of ‘noise’ but in the case of poetry it’s not extraneous to the signal.

not point at all

The scientist [Robert Hooke] turns next to “a point commonly so called, that is, the mark of a full-stop, or period.” Whether printed or made with a pen, the tiny point, circle or dot of the period turns out to be disfigured, ragged, deformed. Under the lens, this microdot looks as though it’s been made with a burnt stick on an uneven floor.

—Brian Dillon, “What Pitiful Bungling Scribbles and Scrawls,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

metaphoric power

The metaphor draws its strength from ever more disparate elements being joined until the difference becomes too great and the power of the metaphor dissipates. Of course the tolerance for disparity depends on the particular reader.

inflated till it pops

His reviews were inflated blurbs, to the point that reading to the end of one you began to wince, sure it was about to burst in your face.

violent forgetting

I notice where a page has been torn out of my notebook and this feels like a violent forgetting.

limited love

They claim to love poetry but can’t name more than a handful of poems beyond their own.

markson notes

Of the many languages that arose among humankind over the centuries, most never developed a written form.

It’s been estimated that Sappho wrote about 10,000 lines of poetry, but only 600 lines or so remain, many just single words on papyri fragments. Whole scrolls of Sappho’s poetry were lost to the fire that destroyed the library at Alexandria in 48 BCE.

“View du Boulevard du Temple” (1838) by Louis Daguerre is thought to be the first photograph wherein a living person is present. A small dark figure on the street in the early morning appears to be getting his boots polished. The person doing the polishing is obscured by the blur of the motions he was making during the long exposure, and by his lower station in life.

counter productive

Your hype is not helping your art.