erase or raise

You hear about a lot of poetry projects involving erasure from existing texts. But no one seems to use the caret…inserting additional material into a source text. Perhaps it’s easier to electively erase. Harder to hoist the banner of one’s own words within the text of another.

larger interests

As just sounds and marks I wouldn’t care a whit for words.

border war

Two writers fighting for the limelight of who is most liminal.

not embarrassed

Millay has been overlooked by the critics of our time until very recently. Two new biographies have ushered in an era in which, I trust, Millay will be brought back into the light she deserves. In all my undergraduate and graduate courses in the seventies and eighties, she was never mentioned, but The Collected Poems, a hardback, given to me by my father one Christmas when I was in college, has been on the shelf by every desk at which I have ever written a word. When I read “Renascence”—her juvenilia, really—I am not embarrassed, either for her or for me. She was learning how to write and I was learning how to read. We started thinking big. We knew, or thought we knew, that for a women’s writing to be taken seriously, we should aim for the “universal,” and what is more universal than all the human cries that ever cried? It is not a sin to overwrite. That is another thing she taught me: not to be embarrassed by large feeling, and not to be embarrassed to let your reader know of that large feeling.

—Robin Behn, “In the Music Room,” Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen.

poet second

Paul Valéry, a poet known almost entirely for his poetics and aesthetic thought.

bigger than that

A theme that couldn’t be reduced to a single word or a short phrase.

who's zoomin' who

Poets rightly fear the powers of their translators.

freedom of information act

As readers we may ask on what, and how many, levels are we allowed to engage this poem. We won’t always get an answer, but we get to ask.

bright birds yet unseen

I hear a hereto unknown species of bird has been found in the forests of Malaysia. Scanning my bookcases I feel certain there are bright and rare poems yet undiscovered behind those spines. But as wonderful as they are, only human encounter makes them existent.

chute to the unknown

He tended to end a poem with a line that was like pulling the lever to a trapdoor.

find the grain

In his long life (seventy-six years) Oppen wrote little prose and fewer than 300 pages of verse. If we have more of him than we have of Catullus, it’s not by much. He prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy. He’d been a tool-and-die maker and a cabinet worker. He once interrupted some blather about Biblical translation by remarking that what they needed for the job was a carpenter: no, better: “a Jewish carpenter.”

     WORKMAN

     Leaving the house each dawn I see the hawk
     Flagrant over the driveway. In his claws
     That dot, that comma
     Is the broken animal: The dangling small beast knows
     The burden that he is: he has touched
     The hawk’s drab feathers. But the carpenter’s is a culture
     Of fitting, of firm dimensions,
     Of post and lintel. Quietly the roof lies
     That the carpenter has finished. The sea birds circle
     The beaches and cry in their own way,
     The innumerable sea birds, their beaks and their wings,
     Over the beaches and the sea’s glitter.

[poem by George Oppen]

—Hugh Kenner, “George Oppen: In Memoriam,” Poetry Project Newsletter, Oct. 1984 , Mazes: essays by Hugh Kenner (North Point Press, 1989).

not about words

Afraid the poem would be about something, the poet wrote what amounted to nothing but words.

far-sighted

He couldn’t write the long poem because he could always see the end from the start.

end this mess

It wasn’t that the poem was looking for an epiphany; it was looking for any kind of ending that would make sense of what came before.

exercise room

Trying to teach poetry with the ‘freeing strictures’ of exercises/prompts.

hiding in plain sight

Poetry in prose camouflage.

taste and timelessness

How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one’s own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened ways through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn’t or no longer moves me. But there are, however and thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice.

—C. K. Williams, “On Being Old,” In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

word poor

A poem afflicted by vocabulary deficiency syndrome.

failing better

It was that kind of poem wherein all its evident failings pointed to a bright future for the poet’s further efforts.

meaning grounded

The poet imagines he can escape the realm of the semantic.

look back askance

Craft is always retrospective.

hidden transmitter

A good poem will always continue broadcasting from an undisclosed location.

alien point-blank green

ARRIVAL AT THE WALDORF

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,

Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say “The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,”
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

— Wallace Stevens, Parts Of A World (1942)

Yesterday afternoon was the 18th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Bonnie Costello featured this poem in her talk entitled "Traveling with Wallace Stevens." In his work as a surety bond lawyer for the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Stevens traveled extensively in the U.S. for a time, but he never traveled farther than Key West.

site and vector

The subject matters: A matter of perspective or approach.

arrogant tyrant

Confronted with unruly language, the poet has the arrogance of Xerxes at the Hellespont. He’ll whip with chains that flow & flux of language to no avail.

refuge for the real

Poetry as the last refuge for those still possessed with a feeling for what is real.

bloodless

The anemic criticism of one who has clearly not read beyond the contemporaries.

point on the horizon

The linebreak as a vanishing point you can’t quite see beyond.

price and peril

I’m going to read you his [Baudelaire’s] poem called The Albatross. It’s a famous poem, and rightly so. Here is the poet before the awful pride carried away his hopes. Here is the poet as misfit and vulnerable. Behold, as Nietzsche wrote, the man!

   Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
   Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
   Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
   Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

   No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
   Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
   Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
   His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

   How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak—
   He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
   They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
   Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

   The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
   A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
   Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
   He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.*

This poem, I think, captures the poet and the predicament in the same net. Here is the price—and the peril. The journals say nothing that the spirit-bird of this verse does not soar above, and leave far behind. This verse stands as a tribute to the ravishing, indelible, undeniable, body of what he was able to accomplish during his short time on earth. The belled reminder of his star-graces, after all that subterranean din.

—Yahia Lababidi, The Artist As Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2010) by Alex Stein.

*Richard Howard translation, Les Fleurs Du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (Godine, 1985)

serifs, filigrees and flourishes

Without a compelling subject the poet always overcompensates with style.

rote tales

The myths are all musty. To echo Sam Goldwyn, “What we need is some new myths.”

over and under

A competently handled translation transcends the original as often as it fails to meet the original on equal terms.

half measures

Poets write criticism as though they were unaware of all the resources of prose.

person first

I go to the reading to experience the personality behind the poetry, not for the performance of the poetry.

real sentiment

     Remind me how we loved our mother’s body
     our mouths drawing the first
     thin sweetness from her nipples

     our faces dreaming hour on hour
     in the salt smell of her lap Remind me
     how her touch melted childgrief

     how she floated great and tender in our dark
     or stood guard over us
     against our willing

Women performing traditional roles are no longer to be ridiculed but rather understood as products of an oppressive order, with, even so, valuable qualities. The terms of evaluation chosen here may strike some readers as verging on sentimentality, but definitions of sentimentality are always culturally determined: it is not a timeless, abstract quality. (When the word “sentimental” was coined in the eighteenth century, it was used in praiseful contexts.) Direct expression of tender feelings in these lines is no doubt part of the women’s aesthetic Rich has been searching for; in any case, the poem has renounced most of the irony and intellectual artillery of her earlier work. If writing tenderly means losing some readers, Rich is prepared to do so, on the chance that she may be making available feelings formerly dismissed as unacceptable for art. Any occasion for reexamining aesthetic strictures ought, of course, to be welcomed. Do we go to poetry mainly to sharpen the psychic (or conversational) defenses useful in daily life or to gain access to feelings we haven’t, for whatever reason, acknowledged?

—Alfred Corn, “Contemporary Poetry’s Mother Tongues,” Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press, 2009)

free associative fragment

Splinter line.

image in motion

Depicting a movement, a gesture, an action rather than a static image.

rewarding difficulty

Often the first reaction is to complain of a poem’s difficulty when you could as easily praise it for rewarding you with time for pensive consideration.

only the work

OF POETRY

there is only the work.

The work is what speaks
and what is spoken
and what attends to hear
what is spoken

—William Bronk, Death is the Place (North Point Press, 1989)

running ahead

To let the words run a little ahead of the mind’s composition of them.

motion pictures

A poet so adept with images the poems seemed like shooting scripts.

nothing more to say

Some poems are graves. You can do little more than leave them.

slows it down

One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.

—Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (Counterpoint, 1983)

case image

The image should be case in point of what is impossible to explain.

shuttered poem

The lines like louvers shut tight against all air and light.

notional value

The dream of a word with a meaning equal to experience.

poetry reading patter

Not matter the merits of the poetry itself, no denying he was a master of the poetry reading patter.

grief strikethrough

It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t suffer a pang at striking certain phrases.

sting's library

Did you grow up with a lot of books?

Sting: We only had two in the house, an illustrated Old Testament and Volume 1 of Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was well versed in everything from “aardvark” to “azimuth,” but little else. The public library became a sort of refuge. I never throw a book away now. I have kept every dog-eared paperback I have ever read. Books are the only things I’m acquisitive about. And no, I don’t lend my books...join the library!

“Sting: By the Book,” interview in New York Times Book Review (September 19, 2013)

ta tum ta tum ta tum ta tum ta tum

The line's meter like a street with speed bumps.

wallpaper poetry

The poetry book was a wallpaper sample book. Full of nice patterns and lovely colors, comfortable to live with.

obsess and haunt

It is the mysterious that I love painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.

—William Baziotes, “Notes on Painting,” It Is (No. 4, Autumn, 1959)

It is the mysterious that I love poetry. It is the movement and the silence. I want my poems to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.

long cast

The long line cast as though by a fly rod over the stream at a shimmer or shadow just under the surface.

sound heavy

He had so much similar rime going on in the poem, I suggested he should ‘echonomize’.

poetry encounter

I know it as poetry when I encounter those compressed expressions marked by nuance, impossible to explain adequately in prose.

good for too

When a good couplet comes together it’s the simultaneous orgasm of language.

dedication denied

A couple hours later, at Pegasus Books on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, I’m not particularly happy either. I’m hunkered down in the poetry section and see two of my books on the shelf: Home Course in Religion and Junior College. I open the first book to the title page, where I have personalized the copy to Claire. Who was Claire? I wonder. I open the second book, which I’ve apparently dedicated to Toby. Perhaps Toby was Claire’s dog?

I leave the bookstore, my shadow tagging along as if it were a friend. At home I count my blessings. My teeth remain in neat rows and my knuckles continue to knock on doors—I do possess ambition. I’m thin. I’m courteous when it counts. I have a wife who loves me almost all the hours of the day.

But I do notice that the hair on my scalp has thinned and my once muscled chest is now part of my padded abs. I’m losing some of myself, piece by piece. My legs, however, still stand with me, two faithful troopers. And my talent remains: at the count of three, I can whip the horse inside me and begin down a path in search of a poem. True, it was only last week I received a rejection slip from a literary magazine in the Midwest no one has heard of, but still!

—Gary Soto, “Reporting On Our Bodies,” What Poets Are Like: Up and Down of the Writing Life (Sasquatch Books, 2013)

attica, attica

A word that’s stuck in the poem and seems to know it doesn’t belong there. Yet its uneasy fidgetiness gives energy to the whole poem.

fantasy while awaiting one's turn

I read my poem and everyone in the circle puts down his/her pen. Folding their hands almost in unison, they all lean forward, listening intently, as though hoping more words will be spoken. And then I awoke from my daydream during workshop, awaiting my turn.

ideal vessel

After reading an almost perfect one, it’s hard not to think of the sonnet as poetry’s ideal vessel.