ursprache
sometimes the words escape me
4.10.2024
4.08.2024
make it stop
And the calliope played on: Kalliope, the muse of epic poetry.
Labels:
calliope,
epic poetry,
Kalliope,
muse
4.07.2024
save a life
Poetry can save one’s life, and it need not be from trauma; it may be as simple as opening one to the world through language.
4.05.2024
one and done
There is art you are grateful to have experienced but wouldn’t want to own. There are poems you’re grateful to have read but wouldn’t read again.
Labels:
art,
disturbing art,
experience,
grateful,
own
4.03.2024
poem in mind
In the mind the poem has its essence before the first word is written.
Labels:
composition,
essence,
first word,
mind
4.02.2024
alt aesthetic
Not everyone need accept your aesthetic.
Labels:
aesthetic,
alt,
alternative,
different
six-hundred coffee-houses
The Viennese café was the quintessential meeting place of the city, a well-upholstered extension of the public sphere. As one historian of this era writes, the Viennese café ‘was an institution of a special kind…a sort of democratic club, for discussion, writing and playing cards’. There were about 600 of these coffee-houses in the imperial capital in 1900. Some Viennese conducted most of their work in cafés, often alternating between two or three favorites in a day. One businessman was said to have had his hours printed on his cards thus:
From 2 to 4 o’clock — Café Landtmann
From 4 to 5 o’clock — Café Rebhuhn
From 5 to 6 o’clock — Café Herrenhof
—Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale U Press, 2023) p 15
From 2 to 4 o’clock — Café Landtmann
From 4 to 5 o’clock — Café Rebhuhn
From 5 to 6 o’clock — Café Herrenhof
—Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale U Press, 2023) p 15
3.28.2024
me poets
When you spend time on social media with other poets you realize how needy they are.
Labels:
facebook,
instagram,
needy,
self promotion,
social media
3.27.2024
text excerpt is enough
I’m suspect of any book that needs a trailer to promote itself. Save your fancy visuals, a short text excerpt will do.
Labels:
book marketing,
excerpt,
suspect,
trailer,
visual
3.26.2024
bookend critics
I think of Perloff and Vendler as bookend critics, standing each on opposite sides of a shelf marked 'modern and contemporary poetry'.
Labels:
critics,
helen vendler,
marjorie perloff,
poetics
3.25.2024
chatter not matter
Language as communication interests me more than language as material.
Labels:
communication,
language,
material
3.23.2024
full of bluster
Young poets have to be full of bluster about what they are doing; otherwise they’d have no confidence to keep writing.
—Charles Simic "The Great Poets’ Brawl of ’68," New York Review of Books, April 23, 2014
—Charles Simic "The Great Poets’ Brawl of ’68," New York Review of Books, April 23, 2014
3.22.2024
3.21.2024
what works for me
Except for authors expressing what works for themselves, I’m not in favor of writer’s advice.
Labels:
what works,
writer's advice
3.19.2024
3.18.2024
under blurbed
Turns out the gathered blurbs were not fulsome enough to please the publisher.
Labels:
blurbs,
book publishing,
fulsome,
publisher
3.16.2024
not easy even in three lines
A short as it is, in just three lines, there are thousands of ways to go wrong in writing a haiku.
Labels:
composition,
haiku,
short poem
3.15.2024
stages of experience
First the poetry startled you, then it enthralled you, then by study you became aware of its faults and limitations—but still you admired this poetry.
Labels:
enthrall,
faults,
reading poetry,
startle,
study
3.13.2024
what is
Tu Fu is far from being a philosophical poet in the ordinary sense, yet no Chinese poetry embodies more fully the Chinese sense of the unbreakable wholeness of reality. The quality is the quantity; the value is the fact. The metaphor, the symbols are not conclusions drawn from images, they are the images themselves in concrete relationship.
[…]
The concept of the poetic situation is itself a major factor in almost all Chinese poems of any period. Chinese poets are not rhetorical; they do not talk about the material of poetry or philosophize abstractly about life—they present a scene and an action. “The north wind tears the banana leaves.” It is South China in the autumn. “A lonely goose flies south across the setting sun.” Autumn again, and evening. “Smoke rises from the rose jade animal to the painted rafters.” A palace. “She toys idly with the strings of an inlaid lute.” A concubine. “Suddenly one snaps beneath her jeweled fingers.” She is tense and tired of waiting for her master. This is not the subject matter, but it is certainly the method, of almost all the poets of the modern, international idiom, whether Pierre Reverdy or Francis Jammes, Edwin Muir or William Carlos Williams, Quasimodo or the early, and to my taste best, poems of Rilke.
[…]
If Isaiah is the greatest of all religious poets, then Tu Fu is irreligious. But to me his is the only religion likely to survive….It can be understood and appreciated only by the application of what Albert Schweitzer called “reverence for life.” What is, is what is holy.
—Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu, Poems,” Classics Revisted (New Directions, 1986)
[…]
The concept of the poetic situation is itself a major factor in almost all Chinese poems of any period. Chinese poets are not rhetorical; they do not talk about the material of poetry or philosophize abstractly about life—they present a scene and an action. “The north wind tears the banana leaves.” It is South China in the autumn. “A lonely goose flies south across the setting sun.” Autumn again, and evening. “Smoke rises from the rose jade animal to the painted rafters.” A palace. “She toys idly with the strings of an inlaid lute.” A concubine. “Suddenly one snaps beneath her jeweled fingers.” She is tense and tired of waiting for her master. This is not the subject matter, but it is certainly the method, of almost all the poets of the modern, international idiom, whether Pierre Reverdy or Francis Jammes, Edwin Muir or William Carlos Williams, Quasimodo or the early, and to my taste best, poems of Rilke.
[…]
If Isaiah is the greatest of all religious poets, then Tu Fu is irreligious. But to me his is the only religion likely to survive….It can be understood and appreciated only by the application of what Albert Schweitzer called “reverence for life.” What is, is what is holy.
—Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu, Poems,” Classics Revisted (New Directions, 1986)
Labels:
action,
chinese poetry,
images,
kenneth rexroth,
method,
scene,
tu fu
3.12.2024
stay humble
Picking up an old poetry anthology, and perusing its contents page: A few names still known, but many more gone from contemporary consciousness.
3.11.2024
where social doesn't mean self
I dream of a social media site where the poets talk about what they’re reading and say very little about their own publications or events.
3.09.2024
the innumerable lost
Being asked to contribute an essay to a book of forgotten or neglected poets—it’s not a small number to choose from.
3.08.2024
you can make this stuff up
Oulipo: mechanical prompts that produce dopey texts.
Labels:
mechanical,
ouilipo,
prompts,
texts
3.07.2024
secrets of beauty
I have just seen at Picasso’s house a drawing on a large canvas that depicts a mass grave. It was as if the drawing was deepened by innumerable lines that the painter had previously erased. These lines bear witness to a search—not for a better line, but for the only line that will do.
Poetry is not holy just because it speaks of things that are holy. Poetry is not beautiful just because it speaks of things that are beautiful. If we are asked why it is beautiful and holy, we must answer as Joan of Arc did when she had been interrogated for too long: “Next question.”
Beauty is lame. Poetry is lame. It is from a struggle with the angel that the poet emerges—limping. This limp is what gives the poet his charm.
The masses can love a poet only by misunderstanding him.
Poetry works like lightning. Lightning strips a shepherd bare and carries his clothes several miles away. It imprints on a ploughman’s shoulder the photograph of a young girl. It can obliterate a wall and leave a tulle curtain untouched. In short, it creates unusual things. The poet’s strikes are no more premeditated than lightning.
A poet should be recognizable not by his style but by the way in which he looks at things.
At first a poet is not read at all. Then he is read badly. Then he becomes a classic, and habit prevents him from being read. Eventually, he retains his few early lovers for eternity.
A poet must not refuse honours, but he must see to it that no one thinks of offering them to him. If they are offered to him, it is because he has done something wrong. He must then accept the honours he is offered as a punishment.
[…]
This is what Erik Satie meant when he said, “It is not enough to refuse The Legion of Honour; you have not to deserve it.
All beautiful writing is automatic.
A poet’s laziness, waiting for voices: a dangerous attitude. It means that he isn’t doing what he needs in order to make the voices speak to him.
I used to use a detective agency’s advertisement to describe the figure of the poet: “Sees everything, hears everything, nobody suspects a thing.”
A poet never has enough freedom. Everything that he hoards turns against him. He is fortunate if somebody plunders him, dupes him, abandons him, ransacks his house, and drives him out of his home.
The poet has a truth of his own that people mistake for a lie. The poet is a lie that tells the truth.
The poet uses ornamentation to win people over and to seduce his readers. One day the ornamentation will fall away.
A poem always unravels too quickly. You have to tie and retie it firmly.
Seriousness that imposes: Never believe it. Never confuse it with gravity.
The canvas hates to be painted. The colours hate serving the painter, the paper hates the poem, and the ink hates us. What remains of these struggles is a battlefield, a famous date, a hero’s testimony.
Éluard’s clear water reflected the nature of his soul and so lovingly deformed it. Those who imitate him can only reflect a reflection.
Poetry is ill-served by people who live with their feet on the ground while wanting to look like dreamers. Poetry walks with one foot in life and one foot in death. That’s why I call it lame, and it is by its lameness that I recognize it.
I have noticed that one must write countless pages before a single word strikes a chord with a reader, or a single detail is remembered. The truth is that people will pass judgement on our house on as slight a basis as the catch on the door. This observation give me a sense of vertigo that makes me lazy.
Why do these thoughts come to me, to someone who is so reluctant to write? It’s probably because—having broken down in a street in Orléans—I am writing them on the move, in a third-class carriage that keeps jogging me. I reconnect with this dear work [of writing] on the endpapers of books, on the backs of envelopes, on tablecloths: a marvellous discomfort that stimulates the mind.*
—Jean Cocteau, selections from Secrets of Beauty (Eris, 2024; based on Éditions Gallimard, 2013), translated by Juliet Powys, with an introduction by Pierre Caizergues.
*The introduction states that this book of thoughts was composed in March 1945 on a journey back to Paris from the town of Anjouin. The car in which Cocteau was traveling broke down and was towed into Orléans, where he then took a train to Paris.
Poetry is not holy just because it speaks of things that are holy. Poetry is not beautiful just because it speaks of things that are beautiful. If we are asked why it is beautiful and holy, we must answer as Joan of Arc did when she had been interrogated for too long:
Beauty is lame. Poetry is lame. It is from a struggle with the angel that the poet emerges—limping. This limp is what gives the poet his charm.
The masses can love a poet only by misunderstanding him.
Poetry works like lightning. Lightning strips a shepherd bare and carries his clothes several miles away. It imprints on a ploughman’s shoulder the photograph of a young girl. It can obliterate a wall and leave a tulle curtain untouched. In short, it creates unusual things. The poet’s strikes are no more premeditated than lightning.
A poet should be recognizable not by his style but by the way in which he looks at things.
At first a poet is not read at all. Then he is read badly. Then he becomes a classic, and habit prevents him from being read. Eventually, he retains his few early lovers for eternity.
A poet must not refuse honours, but he must see to it that no one thinks of offering them to him. If they are offered to him, it is because he has done something wrong. He must then accept the honours he is offered as a punishment.
[…]
This is what Erik Satie meant when he said, “It is not enough to refuse The Legion of Honour; you have not to deserve it.
All beautiful writing is automatic.
A poet’s laziness, waiting for voices: a dangerous attitude. It means that he isn’t doing what he needs in order to make the voices speak to him.
I used to use a detective agency’s advertisement to describe the figure of the poet: “Sees everything, hears everything, nobody suspects a thing.”
A poet never has enough freedom. Everything that he hoards turns against him. He is fortunate if somebody plunders him, dupes him, abandons him, ransacks his house, and drives him out of his home.
The poet has a truth of his own that people mistake for a lie. The poet is a lie that tells the truth.
The poet uses ornamentation to win people over and to seduce his readers. One day the ornamentation will fall away.
A poem always unravels too quickly. You have to tie and retie it firmly.
Seriousness that imposes: Never believe it. Never confuse it with gravity.
The canvas hates to be painted. The colours hate serving the painter, the paper hates the poem, and the ink hates us. What remains of these struggles is a battlefield, a famous date, a hero’s testimony.
Éluard’s clear water reflected the nature of his soul and so lovingly deformed it. Those who imitate him can only reflect a reflection.
Poetry is ill-served by people who live with their feet on the ground while wanting to look like dreamers. Poetry walks with one foot in life and one foot in death. That’s why I call it lame, and it is by its lameness that I recognize it.
I have noticed that one must write countless pages before a single word strikes a chord with a reader, or a single detail is remembered. The truth is that people will pass judgement on our house on as slight a basis as the catch on the door. This observation give me a sense of vertigo that makes me lazy.
Why do these thoughts come to me, to someone who is so reluctant to write? It’s probably because—having broken down in a street in Orléans—I am writing them on the move, in a third-class carriage that keeps jogging me. I reconnect with this dear work [of writing] on the endpapers of books, on the backs of envelopes, on tablecloths: a marvellous discomfort that stimulates the mind.*
—Jean Cocteau, selections from Secrets of Beauty (Eris, 2024; based on Éditions Gallimard, 2013), translated by Juliet Powys, with an introduction by Pierre Caizergues.
*The introduction states that this book of thoughts was composed in March 1945 on a journey back to Paris from the town of Anjouin. The car in which Cocteau was traveling broke down and was towed into Orléans, where he then took a train to Paris.
3.05.2024
almost a solicitation
When a poet gets a “No, thanks,” rejection, he ignores the ‘no’ and clings to that ‘thanks’ and thinks the editor is saying in code, ‘Send me something again soon’.
3.04.2024
building materials
From solitude and silence, the poet erects a home.
Labels:
home,
lives of the poets,
silence,
solitude
3.03.2024
less is more
A shortened life magnifies the poet’s output.
Labels:
early death,
magnify,
oeuvre,
shorten,
suicide
3.01.2024
attention and ardor
To read poetry requires attention and ardor.
Labels:
ardor,
attention,
reading poetry
2.28.2024
avant light
Many of her poems were avant-garde versions of light verse.
Labels:
avant-garde,
light verse
2.27.2024
black sounds
In his 1930 essay, “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement,” Lorca wrote: “All that has black sounds has duende…. The black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.” Lorca goes on to describe the three forces—the Angel, the Muse, and the Duende—that “everyone senses and no philosopher explains.”
According to Lorca, when the Angel sees death on the way he flies in slow circles and “weaves tears of narcissus and ice.” When the Muse sees death, she closes the door. But the Duende “will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death.” Lorca writes: “Everywhere else, death is an end.” Death’s possibility—the necessity of its proximity—is that which makes art human and alive.
The omnipresent loom of death—the body and its dangers, the heart and its constancy of harm—is what makes the poetry of Thomas James so powerful. So ubiquitous is this power of “black sounds” that—according to a student who, in earnest, made a list of Thomas’ touchstones, his word-hoard, his lexicon (such easy prey—moon, stone, bone, wound)—over a dozen instances of the word “dark” appear in this one book. But Lorca wrote, after all, that poems are works of art that have been “baptized in dark water.”
—Lucie Brock-Broido, Introduction to Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008) by Thomas James.
According to Lorca, when the Angel sees death on the way he flies in slow circles and “weaves tears of narcissus and ice.” When the Muse sees death, she closes the door. But the Duende “will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death.” Lorca writes: “Everywhere else, death is an end.” Death’s possibility—the necessity of its proximity—is that which makes art human and alive.
The omnipresent loom of death—the body and its dangers, the heart and its constancy of harm—is what makes the poetry of Thomas James so powerful. So ubiquitous is this power of “black sounds” that—according to a student who, in earnest, made a list of Thomas’ touchstones, his word-hoard, his lexicon (such easy prey—moon, stone, bone, wound)—over a dozen instances of the word “dark” appear in this one book. But Lorca wrote, after all, that poems are works of art that have been “baptized in dark water.”
—Lucie Brock-Broido, Introduction to Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008) by Thomas James.
Labels:
angel,
black sounds,
dark,
death,
duende,
federico garcia lorca,
lucy brock-broido,
muse,
thomas james
2.26.2024
missile strikethrough
When writing, you’ll notice that certain words seem to be looking over their shoulders, certain that at any minute a strikethrough was about to hit them.
Labels:
composition,
deletion,
revision,
shoulder,
strikethrough
2.24.2024
2.23.2024
language system
Analyzing the poem as a language system.
Labels:
analysis,
critical approach,
language system,
system
2.22.2024
2.20.2024
2.18.2024
lyric audacity
‘Where did this fat, good-natured officer…get such astounding lyric audacity, the mark of a great poet?’ wrote Leo Tolstoy of Afanasy Fet.
[…]
[Afanasy Fet’s] poetic credo he summed up in a few words: ‘Anyone who cannot throw himself head-first from the seventh storey with the unshakable belief that he will be borne up on the air is no poet.’ The fixing of a moment in eternity (‘I look straight from time into eternity’)—the fixing in perpetual stillness of an accidental, transient, elusive moment of the soul, of some everyday detail—is the characteristic texture of his poetry:
This leaf that has withered and fallen
Burns with eternal gold in song.
[…]
Lyric audacity is the key to the musicality in Fet’s poetry. Not the communication of meaning, but the inculcation of a mood. Feeling abolishes logic. Fet wrote: ‘Poetry and music are not just related, they are inseparable. All enduring works of poetry, from the Old Testament to Goethe to Pushkin, are essentially musical—songs, harmony--, also truth. I have always been drawn away from the explicit sphere of words to the indeterminate sphere of music, and have gone as far as my strength allowed.’ Tchaikovsky wrote of Fet: ‘I think his poetry is marvellous…At his best, Fet oversteps the bounds of poetry and strides boldly into our terrain. Fet often reminds me of Beethoven.’
[…]
Each poem has its own melody, its rhythmic profile, which is repeated in no other. ‘Seeking to re-create the harmony of truth, the poetic spirit automatically hits on the appropriate musical structure…No musical mood, no work of art’, wrote Fet.
—“The Poetry of Afanasy Fet” by Yevgeny Vinokurov, an essay, which formed the introduction to a Russian edition of Afanasy Fet’s selected poems (1976), translated by Maxwell Shorter.
Afanasy Fet: I have come to you to greet you, selected poems translated by James Greene. Introduction by Harold Gifford and an essay by Yevgeny Vinokurov (Angel Press, 1982).
[…]
[Afanasy Fet’s] poetic credo he summed up in a few words: ‘Anyone who cannot throw himself head-first from the seventh storey with the unshakable belief that he will be borne up on the air is no poet.’ The fixing of a moment in eternity (‘I look straight from time into eternity’)—the fixing in perpetual stillness of an accidental, transient, elusive moment of the soul, of some everyday detail—is the characteristic texture of his poetry:
This leaf that has withered and fallen
Burns with eternal gold in song.
[…]
Lyric audacity is the key to the musicality in Fet’s poetry. Not the communication of meaning, but the inculcation of a mood. Feeling abolishes logic. Fet wrote: ‘Poetry and music are not just related, they are inseparable. All enduring works of poetry, from the Old Testament to Goethe to Pushkin, are essentially musical—songs, harmony--, also truth. I have always been drawn away from the explicit sphere of words to the indeterminate sphere of music, and have gone as far as my strength allowed.’ Tchaikovsky wrote of Fet: ‘I think his poetry is marvellous…At his best, Fet oversteps the bounds of poetry and strides boldly into our terrain. Fet often reminds me of Beethoven.’
[…]
Each poem has its own melody, its rhythmic profile, which is repeated in no other. ‘Seeking to re-create the harmony of truth, the poetic spirit automatically hits on the appropriate musical structure…No musical mood, no work of art’, wrote Fet.
—“The Poetry of Afanasy Fet” by Yevgeny Vinokurov, an essay, which formed the introduction to a Russian edition of Afanasy Fet’s selected poems (1976), translated by Maxwell Shorter.
Afanasy Fet: I have come to you to greet you, selected poems translated by James Greene. Introduction by Harold Gifford and an essay by Yevgeny Vinokurov (Angel Press, 1982).
Labels:
afanasy fet,
harmony,
leo tolstoy,
lyric,
lyric audacity,
music,
risk,
russian poetry,
stakes,
truth
2.17.2024
marvels enough
A kind of poetry that I resisted on many levels yet there were marvels enough in the language to engage me, to keep me reading.
2.16.2024
lyric spark
The poem may be directed to an other or a beloved, yet the self remains the lyric spark.
2.14.2024
anaphora and other refrains
Do I repeat myself, yes, I contain multiples. [tweaking Whitman]
Labels:
anaphora,
multiple,
refrain,
repetition,
walt whitman
2.13.2024
poet me
A poet with all the self-satisfaction you’d expect of an egotist on display.
Labels:
display,
egotist,
self-satisfaction
2.12.2024
gambit without the game
The small poem is a flash, a gesture, a gambit without the game that follows. There’s no room for landscape here, or easeful reflection, but there is the opportunity for humor and poignancy. And this minimalist practice has its masters.
—Billy Collins, Afterword to Musical Tables (Random House, 2022)
—Billy Collins, Afterword to Musical Tables (Random House, 2022)
Labels:
billy collins,
flash,
gambit,
gesture,
humor,
minimalist,
short poem,
small poem
2.10.2024
2.08.2024
chastened reader
Lately what I’ve been reading shames me enough not to write. And that’s a good thing.
2.07.2024
unexpected inevitable
The last line should at first be unexpected but then be inevitable.
Labels:
first,
inevitable,
last line,
unexpected
2.06.2024
bodily function
I don’t write until I feel a physical necessity to commit a feeling or a notion to text. Writing as a bodily function.
Labels:
bodily function,
feeling,
necessity,
physical
2.03.2024
amid alien circumstances
The substance of the late poetry is, then, the emotion of the Poet as Poet (in the romantic sense) when faced with modern times, when forced to exist and to practice his art in the circumstances of the last forty years. . . . Yeats shifted from the effort to write the “poetic” poetry of the nineties to the concern, as poet, with what it was to be a poet amid the alien circumstances of his age. That is why he is so often, in his later poetry, writing about the artists, scholars, and beautiful women he has known, and their unfortunate lives. . . . The will to seek one’s opposite, the doctrine that one must seek one’s anti-self, is at once the method by means of which Yeats found his genuine and peculiar theme, and one more example of the concern with acting a part which flows from the obsession with Art. The result has been a group of poems which will be known as long as the English language exists.
—Delmore Schwartz, “The Poet as Poet” (1939), Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, (U. of Chicago Press, 1970), edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker
—Delmore Schwartz, “The Poet as Poet” (1939), Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, (U. of Chicago Press, 1970), edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker
Labels:
anti-self,
delmore schwartz,
late poetry,
modern,
poet is,
the times,
w.b. yeats
2.01.2024
1.30.2024
by comparison
AI generated poetry makes flarf poetry look like poetic genius.
Labels:
ai,
artificial intelligence,
flarf,
genius
1.28.2024
few stitches
To be permitted a few stitches in literature’s great tapestry.
Labels:
literature,
permit,
stitches,
tapestry
1.27.2024
a book set aside
He'd set aside the book about a decade ago and just today picked it up again as though nothing had happened in between.
Labels:
book,
reading habits,
set aside
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)