2.28.2017

not god (sic) enough

Even if a god offered to ghost write the poem the poet would demur.

2.27.2017

in the public square

A symbol monger. An image grinder. A diction trader. A rhetoric freak. A sound dog.

2.26.2017

written over

Critic, create an exegesis that exceeds the text.

2.25.2017

reality calling

In ordinary language words call up the reality, but when language is truly poetic, the reality calls up the words.

Joseph Joubert, Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899), translated by Katharine Lyttelton.

2.24.2017

not beyond me

Poetry doesn’t need those disappointed poets who have stopped reading and writing poetry only because their work was never recognized.

2.23.2017

on the down low

Let’s keep poetry our secret. Otherwise the culture will only ruin it for us.

2.22.2017

sargeant major

With a glance at the page, the words started to fall into line and form ranks.

2.21.2017

hard reading

A poet of a taxing syntax.

2.20.2017

bhizzt phizzt

A typo is a language short circuit. It breaks and effectively ends the transmission as the reader’s mind struggles to create the proper connection.

2.19.2017

keep an animal

[The poet’s] tragedy is summed up in these word written in a private letter by a contemporary American poet: “For more than a month I have not been able to find time to write anything, and you know how heavy that is to a writer who feels all of youth lost to keep an animal.” Here is the animal, crying to be feed and warmed and housed. Here is the poet, who cannot rest from wanting to set down the bit of reality that he has been able to seize.

—Babette Deutsch, “The Plight of Poetry,” The American Mercury (May 1926)

2.18.2017

small window

He talked in those commonplaces of the workshop method, thus you could tell that everything he knew about poetry was learned in the couple of years he’d spent in a MFA program.

2.16.2017

not the breaking point

For all its effects, the only thing important about the linebreak is that it shouldn’t be where the reader stops reading.

2.15.2017

see-saw

The inverse ratio of heft of content to height of rhetoric.

2.14.2017

high notes

He only wanted to sing the arias.

2.13.2017

covenant of pathos

Stuck for a day in Chicago, I wandered over to The Art Institute of Chicago. (Not that anyone had to twist my arm. We're talking about visiting one of the great museums of the world.) In the Modern wing I happened upon an unattractive though clearly expressionistic portrait by Ludwig Meidner. The label stated this:

Though perhaps best known for his visionary, apocalyptic landscapes, Ludwig Meidner, like many German Expressionists, used portraiture to explore the inner emotional life of his subjects. "Do not be afraid of the face of a human being," Meidner once said. "Don’t let your pen stop until the soul of that one opposite you is wedded to yours in a covenant of pathos." In addition to making self-portraits, Meidner painted many of Berlin’s literati, including the Expressionist poet and theater critic Max Herrmann-Neisse. The artist used the thick paint, energetic brushwork, and distorted form characteristic of Expressionist painting to communicate his subject’s inner vitality and psychological life.

2.10.2017

no line drawn

The prose poet willingly risks even the genre for the good of the poem.

2.08.2017

arrival point

To think of the poem’s end as being an arrival.

2.07.2017

flightless bird

So many feathers and sequins, the piece sagged under the weight of its costume.

2.02.2017

dead end or avenue

People think that many poems are hard to read because of the vocabulary, proper names, lacunae, allusions, etc., things they don’t readily recognize. That’s not a difficulty, that’s an opportunity to explore new avenues of understanding.