no let up

Avant-garde energy is always to be admired.

collectible

The poetry book that the poet could hardly give away now goes for thousands on eBay.

not text

Please don’t ever refer to one of my poems as a ‘text’...it was always about more than that.

death mask

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

—Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," translated by Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, eds. (Belknap Press, 1996)

shameless

A major problem among contemporary poets: They are not embarrassed by the extravagant claims made by the blurbs that grace the back covers of their slim volumes.

mind the gap

The personal lyric is an attempt to fill the gap left by oneself in one's picture of the world which Merleau-Ponty suggests can never be filled.

tin pan alley

The internet is poetry’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’. Some great songs will come out of that electronic cacophony.

demand purity

There is something priggish about these young men of the school of Ingres. They seem to think it highly meritorious to have joined the ranks of “serious painting.“ This is one of the party watch-words. I said to Demay that a great number of talented artists had never done anything worthwhile because they surrounded themselves with a mass of prejudices, or had them thrust upon them by the fashion of the moment. It is the same with their famous word beauty which, everyone says, is the chief aim of the arts. But if beauty were the only aim, what would become of men like Rubens and Rembrandt and all the northern temperaments, generally speaking, who prefer other qualities? Demand purity, in other words.

—Eugène Delacroix, The Journal (9.II.1847)

awakened from a coma

A poem that awakens one from the coma of the commonplace.

escape literature

Poetry always trying to slip the grasp of literature.

adagia to design

Marjorie Perloff delivered the 2009 Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash lecture at the Hartford Public Library last Saturday night. Her talk was entitled: "Beyond Adagia: Eccentric Design in Wallace Stevens' Poetry."

“Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.” —Wallace Stevens, Adagia

strain the sonnet

The subject of a sonnet should strain the ambit of the form.

time to trim one's sails

When writing a poem, to start another page should be like raising another sheet on a schooner. There should be wind for it. Otherwise it’s best to trim one’s sails (or to revise, one might say).

walk off

That last line was a walk-off home run.

word built

Word by word the poem built its case.

meanwhile elsewhere

He was a New York School poet stuck in Peoria: An I-don’t-do-this & I-don’t-do-that-either poet.

duly noted

A poem that annotated itself as it went along.

relative scale

A great poet from a small country. A minor poet from a large country.

sonic code

The poem as sonic coding.

no longer, not yet

My poetry doesn’t change from place to place—it changes with the years. It’s very important to be one’s age. You get ideas you have to turn down—‘I’m sorry, no longer’; ‘I’m sorry, not yet’.

—W. H. Auden, quoted in Words and Their Masters by Israel Shenker, with photographs by Jill Krementz (Doubleday & Co., 1974)

masthead

The program hired a masthead name not a poet, and certainly not a teacher.

purple and paisley

Purple in description and paisley in design.

no layoff

Poet’s Work


Grandfather
     advised me:
          Learn a trade

I learned
     to sit at a desk
          and condense

No layoff
     from this
          condensery

—Lorine Neidecker, Home/World

and not &

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry: Sounds somewhat warmed-over. It's not Blast or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, that's for sure. Academic style manuals perhaps ruled against use of the ampersand in the title.

zukofsky quoted at length

Departing from my usual brevity, today I've quoted (below) at length from the works of Louis Zukofsky. But doing so in a white typeface may prove difficult to read. For this I apologize.


"




















                            ."
—Louis Zukofsky

sweet slime

The line left a slime trail of syrupy poeticisms.

tagger

Poet, be a tagger of the walls of silence.

one poem, one life

To write a poem that would save a stranger’s life.

specific gravity

In poems words will naturally increase in semantic specific gravity.

train wreck

Train wreck critic.