Saturday, November 21, 2009

no let up

Avant-garde energy is always to be admired.

Friday, November 20, 2009

collectible

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

Thursday, November 19, 2009

not text

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

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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)

Monday, November 16, 2009

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.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

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.

Friday, November 13, 2009

tin pan alley

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

Thursday, November 12, 2009

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)

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

awakened from a coma

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

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

escape literature

Poetry always trying to slip the grasp of literature.

Monday, November 09, 2009

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

Thursday, November 05, 2009

strain the sonnet

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

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

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).

Monday, November 02, 2009

walk off

That last line was a walk-off home run.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

word built

Word by word the poem built its case.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

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.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

duly noted

A poem that annotated itself as it went along.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

relative scale

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

Monday, October 26, 2009

sonic code

The poem as sonic coding.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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)

Saturday, October 24, 2009

masthead

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

Friday, October 23, 2009

purple and paisley

Purple in description and paisley in design.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

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

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

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

Monday, October 19, 2009

sweet slime

The line left a slime trail of syrupy poeticisms.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

tagger

Poet, be a tagger of the walls of silence.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

one poem, one life

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

Friday, October 16, 2009

specific gravity

In poems words will naturally increase in semantic specific gravity.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

train wreck

Train wreck critic.