required letters

To write this poem, you’re almost going to need a new alphabet.

time sensitive

Different times different poems: A poem written late at night. A poem written at first light.

high-five rimes

Let’s just say his rhymes were so predictable and ringing that I thought of them as high-fiving one another.

second trial

Interestingly enough, the best words ever spoken of Howl were said at its obscenity trial in the moment of its emergence. During the second Eisenhower administration things were culturally very tight, and artists and critics, recovering from the McCarthy era, rushed to the defense of a poem attacked by the Establishment. Rarely has an unknown poem by an obscure poet known such high praise before it has been assessed by the scholarly community. But as soon as the trial was over and the battle won, a reverse set in. The poem began its work of effecting a critical reevaluation of the course of poetry, and the defensive reaction was intense. For a few years you could hardly find anyone who would say a good word for it, but gradually its liberating role was effected, and it has emerged as the guerdon of its generation.

—William Everson, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (Oyez, 1976)

faced with nothing

And then the page went limp as white cloth, floated up and settled over your face as though a shroud.

time and materials

Anything can be art, and some of it is.

azure free zone

[Philip Levine] was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.”…Fake language made bad poems.

—Mark Levine, “Philip Levine,” in Remembering Poets, Poetry (March 2013)

terms of engagement

A good critic, particularly one who is a poet, puts his/her aesthetics aside in order to properly engage another poet on his/her own terms.

person of interest

Perhaps when we speak of ‘voice’ what we’re hearing through the language is the poet’s character. In ‘talk poetry’ what we too often get is caricature or the cartoon outline of a person behind the poem.

first reading

A poem is at its best in its first reading.

lower the volume

For the most part, good poets are humble not hortatory.

jolly roger

Poet, hoist high the pirate flag of your poem.

or at least saying

And poetry, to my understanding, is not about saying things, though obviously poems that have interesting things to say are more interesting than poems that don’t. And it is not quite accurate to say that they are about dramatizing the act of saying things or, in the case of an inward poetry, thinking things or, in a quicker and more visceral poetry, perceiving and sensing things. Or at least saying that poetry does these things only takes us partway into them. To go the rest of the way, one needs a formulation that somehow says that poetry inhabits the interior of the rhythm of its way of seeing, its way of dramatizing what it is to say a thing, or think it, or perceive it, or—taking writing as an act of painting—do it.

—Robert Hass, “On Teaching Poetry,” What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (Ecco, 2012)

roses that are looked at

"the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at." So goes a line from the "Burnt Norton" section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. For twenty years that line was in my mind as, "the roses had the look of roses that are looked at." Perhaps some Steinian involution had inflected my memory. I think I like my version better.

truth and beauty

The poet averred her sincerity and the truth of the poems when she read, but then I bought her new book and I saw that her author photo was at least ten years out of date.

audience of one

A poet who never attended readings unless he was reading, or the reader was a poet whose favor he wanted.

sound decision

One who would never sacrifice the right word for the useful sound.

booster seat

As he recited his various publications, he seemed to sit a little higher in his chair. It was then I imagined him sitting on a stack of books.

moment of conviction

The first question in poetry at that time was simply the question of honesty, sincerity. The point for me, and I think for Louis [Zukofsky], too, was the attempt to construct a meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry, from the imagist intensity of vision. If no one were going to challenge me, I would say “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I’d say anyway, “a test of sincerity.” That there is a moment, in actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from those moments of conviction.

—George Oppen, quoted in Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do (Ecco, 2012)

sentence structure

Despite its effort to undermine, to subvert, even to try to damage the sentence, poetry will find that the sentence is a very resilient and adaptable thing.

practical concerns

Poet, before you take flight, sew your wings on tight.

show me your papers

Be ready to inspect the critic’s credentials at the border (before the review).

not bounded

No matter its first and last line a poem has no beginning or end.

black box

The critic tries to find the poem’s flight recorder sunk somewhere among its wreckage. Sometimes understanding is a futile pursuit.

wild draft

Not only a rough draft, but one that was rugged and wild.

not in the throat

The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.

—Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende (New Directions, 1998), translation by Christopher Maurer.

yet unbroken

The integral lines that broke just the same.

weights and measures

Each word weighed and measured upon the scale of the tongue.

he walks the line

The old verse poet kept iambling along.

impossible and plain

Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.

—Susan Howe, "Scare Quotes II," The Midnight (New Directions, 2003)

poem atop poem

The poem's title was a poem itself.

center justified

It must be because it appears more like a hymn or a prayer when arrayed that way, that naïve poets center their lines on the page.

taking refuge in work

After reading a spate of flighty and off-the-top-of-the-head kind of poetry, all I want to do is to read some work. I want to see and feel the workmanship that went into a poem’s making.

in the muck

Whether send-up, satire, or snark, one has to care too much about contemporary culture to be a postmodernist.

small bold thing

Sometimes when I read a slight but delightful poem, I think that I wouldn’t have had the confidence to make a poem out of so little.

violates the superficial

Daniel Halpern, in his introduction to Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment, offers three criteria for visionary poems: “First, they must honor their language (oral or written), whether it be English, French, German, Kashmiri, Hindi, Sanskrit, or Persian, acknowledging Santayana’s observation that ‘the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.’ Second, the poems must fulfill, with unerring precision, the requirements of their form, whatever that form turns out to be. And third, the poetry must operate in a visionary realm—that is, present a view of the world that violates the superficial, reaches through the surface to touch the primal material. Wordsworth would call this act the seeing into the life of things; Ruskin wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way…To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, The Hide-And-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013)

cliché critique

When criticizing common expressions or themes, too many critics/reviewers are quick to cue that commonplace dictum of Pound’s: “Make it new.” Shouldn’t the critic/reviewer abide by the same standard and make his/her case without resorting to a cliché quote?

scanning the obits

I was glad to read in your last poem that no one had died.

single voice

Monomedium Productions presents “The poetry reading.”

window pane

Each page a window into the writer's mind.

invisible form

With invisible form, the poet and the form and the material are like somebody riding a horse over broken terrain. The three are constantly changing. The horse and rider accede to the varying hillside, the rider adjusts when the horse finds solutions, the horse adapts to each move the rider makes. And all of it subject to where the rider plans to be that night.

This overall deciding is central to invisible form, since its nature is to implement. It makes the poem do something beyond tactics. Many people feel there should be more democracy in writing poems, that the poem should be allowed to find its own form. But it is not a way to get out of the valley before dark. Given a chance, the horse will spend a lot of time eating…Left to themselves, [poems] lapse into their default state—which is minor poetry.

—Jack Gilbert, “The Craft of the Invisible,” (Ironwood)

wrong place wrong time

In recent hostage-taking incident, the bank robber emerged from the bank holding one of the hostages as a human shield. When the SWAT team commander heard that the human shield was a poet, he ordered the police sharpshooter to “Take the shot.”

“All poets all have a death wish anyway,” he was quoted as saying to the press afterward.

passing strange

The poem was an image parade.

essential eye

As I became a better reader I found I could stare right through the cover and fix my eyes on the few essential passages therein. Or perhaps that was my fantasy.

advice to artists

Go big or be exquisite.

few and far between

The poems of happiness happen less.

ends beyond effects

The artist conceals the ordeal of labor in order to manifest the work. Created in time, and as well received in time, works of art have absolute beginnings in intention and absolute ends beyond their effects.

—Susan Stewart, “Ovid’s Contests of Making,” The Poet’s Freedom (U. of Chicago Press, 2011)

working script

A poet asks the words to be actors in his play.

as stock-in-trade

A poet will always have a few choice words for you.

limited time offer

Wait, there's more! If you order right now, we'll send you the links to The Collected Early Poetry, The Collected Later Poetry, The Selected Poetry, The Complete Poetry and The Uncollected Poetry, all for $1.99, plus $19.99 server download charge.

odd nun

Prone to linguistically ecstatic and visionary flights, she was poetry’s odd nun. [Thinking of Marianne Moore.]

dead animals

There were so many dead animals in the poet’s book I began to think he’d missed his calling as a taxidermist.

plain text

Over the years the covers of poetry books have gone from plain, stark words printed within a border, to elaborate and often intriguing multi-color works of art. Yet the text inside remains its simple self.

potential halo

Husserl’s descriptions of what constitutes a world, with its inner horizons of what is perceived and known and its outer regions of the unperceived and unknown, resonate with poetic intimations of the power that resides within everydayness and informs the way ordinary things admit a horizon, suggesting another side of reality, unseen within our habitual quotidian regard. The poetry of both Rilke and Robert Frost intimates another side of things beyond the world’s inner horizons, suggesting not so much a radical mysticism, but a view that the mysterious and unknown remain relevant to our everyday life, as a potential halo surrounding the most ordinary things and experiences. When the mysteriousness is acknowledged the ordinary look of things is radically transformed; for these poets this means that they are seen more truly in a reality of greater and more intensely magnified dimensions than our ordinary habits of perception allow.

—Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian (Penn. State Univ. Press, 2007)

thrown together text

A long poem without a discernible organizing principle, without narrative or without a recurring theme, and comprised of discrete and easily separable sections that could be reordered without diminishment to the whole, is not a long poem.

shortcut life

In literature, dying young seems to be a shortcut to fame. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a career path.

mind enamored

Lounging on a divan of gray matter, the poet’s mind was his one inamorata. [Thinking of Wallace Stevens]

drone on

It's been reported that the Poetry Foundation has sponsored a drone that is flying over Chicago, threading skyscrapers, slowly passing over neighborhoods, all the while broadcasting poetry to unsuspecting passers-by in the streets below.

the next big thing: a meme about new books

Anny Ballardini over at NarcissusWorks tagged me with this set of questions. Although I think it was a mistake, as my answers will explain...

What is the working title of the book?

     It should be "le livre imaginaire," because everything about my book is somewhat imaginary.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

     I'm full of ideas. And I believe, contrary to Mallarmé, that poems and ideas can cohabitate happily. Often the individual poems I write deal directly with particular ideas. But no one of these ideas would be suitable in & of itself for building a book around it.

What genre does your book fall under?

     Unpublished, if that is a genre. If not, it should be. Certainly since Dickinson, with her carefully ribboned fascicles, unpublished in book form should be a genre.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

     Older people tell me I look like Tyrone Power. Middle age people say I look like Kevin Kline. Younger people don't have an opinion on the matter. So currently I'll go with Bradley Cooper.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

     Work-in-progress; like most things in life. In poetry it doesn't seem to be a problem to publish unfinished things.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

     30 years, thus far.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

     Individual poems inspire me. Books do not. I think poets spend for too much time obssessing over their books, thematic coherence, the order of the poems, etc.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

     The fact that my book may never be a book should be intriquing. It intrigues me.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

     None of the above.

I tag Donna Fleischer at the word pond. Here is her Q & A. Thanks, Donna. Meme on.

landscape cloak

The title of Zanzotto’s first collection, Dietro il paesaggio, indicates what has become an enduring desire to indeed go behind the landscape, into it, and out upon it, to literally wrap it around the self—as is expressed in the closing lines of the poem “Ormai” (By Now), in which the landscape is conceived of as a type of protecting cloak: “Here all that’s left is to wrap the landscape around the self / and turn your back.” Zanzotto’s recognition of the total encirclement of the self by one’s surroundings reveals a deep rootedness, at once warmly familiar and yet also uneasily enclosing.

—Patrick Barron, introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (U. of Chicago Press, 2007), edited and translated by Patrick Barron.