2.29.2016

cause of death

To a poet suicide is death by a natural cause.

2.28.2016

money pit

Are manuscript contest entry fees and other submission fees draining the disposable income that poets have for buying poetry books?

2.27.2016

in closing

If nothing else, the last line has pride of place.

2.25.2016

breeze of surprise

     There are so many ways to go, the detectives know, opposition and conflict, theories drifting over and beyond one another. Things changed by the act of observation. The old laws of physics. Speed and position. Time and distance.
     They will comb through images, looking for any random detail, the breeze of surprise, a clue. The more obscure the moment, the more valuable the knowledge. There is always a chance they will spot something they already overlooked.
     They work in much the same way as poets: the search for a random word, at the right instance, making the poem itself much more precise.

—Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

2.24.2016

impaired

One might say the last two lines of that sonnet were ‘the odd couplet’.

2.23.2016

public storage space

The prose poem’s great flaw is that it’s anything and all.

2.22.2016

cast out

A poem that was read as though it were a magic spell.

2.21.2016

personal library

I visited the reestablished Thomas Jefferson Library in the Library of Congress yesterday. Some titles have not been replaced from the original catalog. Jefferson ordered his books according to Lord Bacon's system of the subject areas: Memory, Reason, and Imagination. Jefferson used the categories "History," "Philosophy," and "Fine Arts."

2.20.2016

ticking line

Meter is a lateral clock.

2.18.2016

core story

The poem was a thumbnail novel.

2.17.2016

echo chamber

That is, in poetry more than in any other verbal genre, readers bring an expectation that not only do all the elements matter down to the comma and the white space at the end of a line and between or within stanzas, but that each of those elements, no matter how widely arrayed, may tug at other elements and condition the whole. The poem is an echo chamber where we listen to the reverberations that otherwise dissolve into the white noise of anxiety.

—Lee Upton, “Poetry, Defined. Briefly.” Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo Press, 2012)

2.14.2016

comedy club

I couldn’t be sure if he was a critic or a heckler.

[Thinking of William Logan.]

2.13.2016

battle lines

There are many ways to go wrong in writing a political poem, but the number is no greater than those encountered in writing a love poem.

2.12.2016

press press pull

Each line a lever in that strange contraption called a poem.

2.10.2016

passing fancy

Engaged in a language dalliance.

2.08.2016

the fruit

The Fruit

This is how I want the poem to be:
trembling with light, coarse with earth,
murmuring with waters and with wind.

—Eugénio de Andrade, 28 Portuguese Poets (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2015), translated by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levtin.

Os Frutos

Assim eu queria o poema:
frementa de luz, áspero de terra,
rumoroso de águas e de vento.

2.07.2016

hard cases

He wrote poems with words that don’t fit well into poems.

2.06.2016

nth sense

Poetry is a human sensory faculty as yet not fully understood.

2.04.2016

late bloomer

Sometimes one of the best poets of a previous century only emerges in the next.

[Thinking of the Frost.]

2.02.2016

giant killer

A haiku that could humble a poem of a hundred lines.