3.30.2016

digging and sifting

Less creativity and more archaeology; that is, less imagination and more psychic excavation.

3.29.2016

figure esquisse

If there’s no word for something, we can always use others to sketch its outline.

3.28.2016

as in love

Don’t go for the fast word. Wait for the fated word.

3.27.2016

human document

I most admire those writers who lived to write.

[Thinking of Jim Harrison.]

3.26.2016

endlessness

I am interested in the ways language can suggest or provoke (though never surround) an endlessness.

—Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1993)

3.25.2016

coruscating course

A long poem flecked with many lyrics.

3.24.2016

character slide

A critic who began his career as a curmudgeon but in time became a crank.

[Thinking of Karl Shapiro.]

3.23.2016

reflexive property

He said that poetry was difficult. Like life?, I said.

3.22.2016

loss for words

This is a poem that should be quickly translated into a dying language.

3.21.2016

in the end is the beginning

A gifted lyric poet who lacked only the ability to see that he was rewriting one poem.

3.20.2016

comic turn

After modernism, formal poetry became a special case of light verse.

3.19.2016

moving parts

Practical or sensitive form—that the artist feels relationships, i.e. weights, measures, durations, correspondences, gravities, propulsions, and cooperates to set them in motion. The physical universe has “laws” of motion and the artist is sensitive to them. Here language—as well as paint, tones struck from the string—is a “matter” of vibrations; and form has to do with the working in structures of moving parts.

—Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetic Form,” The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of Their Work (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979) edited by Reginald Gibbons

3.18.2016

spinning wheel

This section of your poem is just buffering.

3.16.2016

fast talkers

An interview is a casual shortcut to exposing (for the interviewer) and to espousing (for the interviewed poet) a method and a poetics.

3.10.2016

universal accord

Criticism tries to steady the jangly localities of taste by striking a universal chord.

3.08.2016

horsemen pass by

The barbarians didn’t ransack the library because they didn’t know what it was.

[I realized after posting this one that I'd perhaps lifted the notion from Karl Shapiro's essay "The Poetry Wreck."]

3.06.2016

attempts to revisit

To revise one attempts to revisit the original psychic space of the piece’s composition.

3.05.2016

overplatoed his hand

Plato, courageous almost beyond belief, secure in his own literary powers, nevertheless appears to discard his own defensive irony when he rejects Homer in the Republic. Scholars of philosophy are not very wary in regard to Plato’s blunder, because (at their best) philosophy is for them a way of life. But Plato sought to replace Homer as the culture of Greece, which was as likely as demoting Shakespeare for the English-speaking world, Goethe for the Germans, Tolstoy for the Russians, Montaigne and Descartes for the French. I would add Walt Whitman for the New World, except that we have not yet learned how to read him, except for a handful: Thoreau, Hart Crane, Borges, Pessoa, Neruda.

—Harold Bloom, “The Greeks: Plato’s Contest with Homer,” Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Riverhead Books, 2004)

3.02.2016

long gone

I read the poem for a while, and then, my being unnecessary to its course, I just let it go on without me.

3.01.2016

incarcerated

A poem locked in the prison of the canon.