7.29.2008

airbuilt

I see little difference between poets and the inventors of self-propelled flying machines.

7.28.2008

leap or fall

There is something in art that can’t be taught: What can be taught is an approach, an address or a stance, a way of being available to what might come next. But in all art, after that, it’s the leap, or the fall, and those events can only be experienced.

7.27.2008

substitution of terms

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.
—John Godfrey Saxe (lawyer and poet), The Daily Cleveland Herald, March 3, 1869.

Poems, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

7.24.2008

reader or hoarder

I fear I’ve gone from being a book reader to a book hoarder.

7.23.2008

phone sex scansion

When poets talk about scansion it reminds me of phone sex…lovers from afar aching to close the distance.

7.21.2008

wave building

Feel the line build, a wave about to break.

7.20.2008

poetry of flowers

The poetry of flowers contains no pedantry and no affectation.

—Anna Fitch Ferguson, Bits of Philosophy (1933)

(At a book sale, I found this lovely little book by a woman who lived much like Thoreau at Walden Pond: simply, with a writing implement and ready aphorism.)

7.19.2008

plain sight

Plain sight is poetry because real seeing is such a rare phenomenon.

7.17.2008

beset piece

It could be described as a beset piece.

7.16.2008

lost in its distance

A poem at a remove, is a poem flirting with the chasm in which it will be lost.

7.15.2008

word oasis

A word oasis in a language-parched land.

7.13.2008

unnecessary / essential

Poetry exists at the poles of unnecessary language and essential language.

7.10.2008

abstract critical violence

But I would raise the question…whether what I have called “matter of fact” criticisms (of which there have been a good many varieties) are not less likely, in general, to do violence to our common sense of apprehension of literature or poetry than the “abstract” criticisms I have contrasted with them. The “abstract” method , as Hume said, apropos of its use in morals, “may be more perfect in itself, but suits less the imperfection of human nature, and is a common source of illusion and mistake in this as well as in other subjects.”

—R.S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (U. of Toronto Press, 1953)

7.09.2008

banal personal reminisces

Why are so many banal personal reminiscences passed off as poetry?

7.07.2008

resists paraphrase

A poem that resists paraphrase at every turn.

7.02.2008

meaning matters

The meaning is the matter.

7.01.2008

threatens literature

To write the poetry that threatens literature as we know it.