pure poet

I met a pure poet once. He dressed the part: A thrift store wool vest over a white shirt and beaten jeans. He was someone who wrote poems and worked as a cook in a restaurant. I don’t think he was ever recognized for his poetry in his lifetime. But I recognized him as a poet the first time I heard him read.

small door

The door
We go through—
So small.

The rooms
We enter—immense.

—Gregory Orr, The City of Poetry (Sarabande Books, Quarternote Chapbook Series #10. 2012)

spent life

I’ve spent most of my adult life devoted to poetry, and still how little I know.

poor substitute

In literary works imagination proves to be a poor substitute for experience.

heard them coming

I could hear your rhymes coming, and by the time they landed, I had already found several preferable alternatives.

too smooth

Always the desire to smooth when to disturb would improve the work.

slow approach

When the scholars find a work of art they approach it like archaeologists.

true poems

Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I turn the pages of my own poems gathered in a single volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the old verse that says it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not what I have written but what I should like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have not had the strength to realize.

—Wallace Stevens, acceptance speech at 1955 National Book Awards ceremony (for The Collected Poems, Knopf, 1954)

design + build

Another way to think of poetic form: Not as a template passed down through time, but something designed and built by the language of a particular poem.

remembered poems

Poets make poems but readers make remembered poems.

poetic metaphysics

We can expose the poem’s inner working, and yet not know it fully. Not unlike the soul which we feel but cannot locate within the human body.

cut it

Poet, don’t end the poem—just cut it.

minor bang

A haiku is a pocket universe.

must be precise

#61
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023), translation by Anton Hur

faux po

A poem full of fraud words.

squeeze box

You can tell when the poet is squeezing the language to get a sigh or shriek out of it. Let the emotional content in the writing arise without pressing on the material.

finale-less

Often I’ve left a fireworks show with the sense that the whole experience would have been better without the lighting off of the grand finale. It’s something to consider when concluding a poem.

words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

essential experience

Imagination fails the further it gets from experience.

early risers

The dawn is a term for the early morning used by poets and other people who don’t have to get up.

—Oliver Herford

flash to ash

The poem composed in a flash, and any revision would leave only ash.

dead dead

He went back to revise the poem not realizing rigor mortis had set in.

from other tongues

Often it’s non-native speakers who write the most beautiful English sentences.

root cellar

You haven’t gone down to basement of this poem. There's a root cellar with a door hanging by one hinge and some cobwebs waiting to be pushed open.

worth the effort

Spend the time revising this poem, or just spin up a new one.

gifting library

Don’t ask me how many books I own—ask how many I’ve read and passed on.

poet praising poet

I love a good homage poem—a poet praising another poet—knowing how hard it is to write even a few poems that make themselves known and at the same time matter.

other voice

I am asserting that poetry is irreducible to ideas and system. It is the other voice. Not the word of history or of antihistory but the voice that, in history, always says something else—the same something since the beginning. I don’t know how to define this voice or explain what it is that constitutes this difference, this tone which, though it doesn’t set it altogether apart, makes it unique and distinct. I will say only that it is strangeness and familiarity in person. We need only hear it to recognize it.

—Octavio Paz, “Latin-American Poetry,” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987)

stands aside

The poet stands aside: Someone standing in the shadow of the doorway, waiting for hours for who knows what.

light fare

He’d tasted some of this, some of that,
but he never made a meal of one book,
nor had he ever feasted for days
at the banquet of an author’s oeuvre.

is quantum

All translation is quantum.

reel off

When you realize you can really write, I mean you can reel off line after line effortlessly, that’s when you need to set some limits.

more than speech

When reading your poetry consider: enunciation, pace, pauses (silence), tone and modulation. Some poets aren’t blessed with pleasing voices, but they can thoughtfully manage their speech patterns to better present their poetry.

inspired reader

A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized—or at least everyone recognizes his own poet—by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.

—Paul Valéry, “Poetry of Abstract Thought” (1939), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 (Wesleyan U. Press, 2004), edited by Melissa Kwasny

empty basket

Each time I passed the poet busking in the square he seemed to be getting thinner.

detail minded to death

A writer is someone who even fusses over the font style of his gravestone.

workshop is

Workshop: Eight to ten people talking about a poem none of them could’ve written.

kinds of containers

A poem to me is a container whether it be benign like a water pitcher or dangerous like a pipe bomb.

theme and form

I always have two things in my head—I always have a theme and the form. The form looks for the theme, the theme looks for the form, and when they come together you’re able to write.

—W.H. Auden, “Obiter Dicta,” W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 1995) by Charles Osborne

in place of a poem

The mountain of text that took the place of a poem.

[A wry riff on Stevens]

no homilies here

There is no place for homilies in poetry.

slow release

A poem as a slow-release potion.

from mouth to immortality

A poem finds itself most alive in the mouth, but for immortality it must find a place where it’s written down.

preparing to write

Unless you’re brooding, muttering under your breath, pacing away from your desk, then you are probably not ready to write.

two halves

Half of the published poems are a half too long.

abrupt edge

The abrupt edge is actually an ornithological term that I have turned into a metaphor . . . It’s that area of greatest interest and intensity— for birds, of course, but I think also as a metaphor— between the dangerous open space and the bower or covered safe place, let’s say the woods as opposed to an open field—where the danger is, where anything can happen. If [ I ] can find a sense of the experience where there is both danger and safety—and maybe the safety part is the form— then I think I’ve got it right. The danger, of course, would be in the content.

—Stanley Plumly, A Conversation with Maryland Poet Laureate Stanley Plumly by Kathleen Hellen, The Baltimore Review.

get close

You can’t read a poem nor write a poem, unless you can close read a poem.

crack of the lash

Poet, crack that first line like a lash.

driven home

The throughline of the poem ended with a last line that was a stake in the ground.

the subject is

 The poem is the subject of the poem.

not that kind of light

 The flaw of thinking that language could ever illuminate one’s life.

better fit

Many poets don’t realize their poems would be a better fit as prose.

same same

One felt the poet could go on endlessly in the same register and tone of voice.

be rid of it

Borges likes to say that he is lazy.

“If some notion comes into my head, and now and then it does, let’s say a notion about a story or about a poem, I do my best to discourage it. But if it keeps on worrying me then I let it have its way with me and I try to write it down in order to be rid of it.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Words and Their Masters (Doubleday, 1974) p41

shut up

Closing the book a few pages in is the reader’s way of shutting up the author.

mood matters

Remember that your mood will determine how you read or hear a poem.

to have no words

There are many ways to praise a poem, including being struck speechless.

critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

talk talk

Try not to talk your way out of a poem. It’s going to take too long.

whisper or gurgle

Isaiah 29:4. “And thou shalt be brought down, and speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.” This describes true poetry. Language suffering the condition of its utterance. Like Pier delle Vigna in Dante, “si della scheggia rotta usciva insieme / parole e sangue, che io lasciai la cima / cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme” (So from the broken twig spewed out words and blood, so that I let the branch fall, and stood like a man in fear). All spitting and hissing, primal language of pain, original language. Language is a physical medium, needs blood or dust to come true. Poetry must whisper or gurgle.

—Rosanna Warren, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets (Norton, 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss. [297]

writer killer

Those dour author photos that look like assassins.

its own little word

Everything around us is a sub-culture, including poetry.

almost a sentence

The closer a line of poetry is to a sentence, the more power it has.

summarized

The poem’s title was a synopsis of the poem.

dissolving lines

A poem that was dissolving in the mind even before you reached the last line.

looking out

I’m more interested in poetry that looks out and around and not poetry that looks primarily within.

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

what wells up

Too often writing a poem on a whim rather than waiting for the utterance to well up from within.

woolgathering

Poet, don’t worry over your woolgathering ways—that’s how poems get made.

do no harm

All poetry workshops should adopt the Hippocratic motto: "to help, or at least, to do no harm," shortened in Latin as, primum non nocere, ‘first, do no harm’.

welcoming all that follow

Being the first genre, poetry embraces all other genres.

game player

A parlor-game kind of poetry.

it works that way

It wasn’t the poem I meant to write, but it was the poem I did write.

trunk of a tree

When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained,
Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.
Indeed, feeling and expression should never fail to correspond,
As each emotional change wears a new complexion on a sensitive face.
Thought that swells with joy bursts into laughter;
When grief is spoken, words reverberate with endless sighs;
No matter if the work be accomplished in one flash on the page,
Or is the result of the most deliberate brush.

—Lu Chi (261- 303), “The Working Process,” Essay on Literature (translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen), Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century (Grove Press, 1965), edited by Cyril Birch. [This essay was written in rhymed-prose and was composed three years before Lu Chi was executed during a power struggle of the Chin court.]

jail break

Poet, make a genre jail break.