poor po

To tweak a line from the Gospels, "The poor po will always be with us."

lives of the young poets

Politics was not our sole passion. We were even more attracted by literature, the arts, and philosophy. For me and for a few of my friends, poetry turned, if not into a public religion, at least into an esoteric cult wavering between the catacombs and the conspirators’ basement. I found no contradiction between poetry and revolution: they were two facets of the same movement, two wings of the same passion. This belief would link me later to the surrealists. The plural avidity: life and books, street and cell, bars and loneliness in crowds in cinemas.

—Octavio Paz, Itinerary (Harcourt, 1999), translated by Jason Wilson [33]

hard on the head

It certainly wasn’t concrete poetry…but it was obdurate to human understanding.

still talking

No matter how it started, no matter where it went, he could talk his way out of any poem.

wading into the waves

I know it's bad form when litmags don’t respond in a timely fashion. And there are egregious cases of litmags holding work for a year or more only to reject it. On the other side, I think of the first editor of Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray, and what he described as the 'undertow of words'. I’m not without some sympathy for those readers/screeners and editors wading into the waves of submissions.

this way always then that

The education of a poet is continuous and divergent.

all beat

You got the meter right but pity there was no poetry to pin to it.

lives of the poets

I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kuo P’o, long
dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and
after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
-
I thought of Tsu Yung who, at his examination, wrote a
a poem of only four lines. Questioned by the examiner, he
replied: “That was all I had to say.”

—Eliot Weinberger, The Life of Tu Fu (New Directions, 2024)

[More excerpts over at Tramp Freighter.]

less than

A cento is always less than the sum of its parts.

stop short

Look for that preemptive ending that undercuts any temptation toward a grand concluding flourish.

all about me

Her poems were language selfies.

whip hand

Some just ride the poem; some hold the whip and will use it.

blank block

[This page unintentionally left blank.]

general glut

When submitting work ask if you’re contributing to a general literary glut.

no better or worse

A poem that could be endlessly revised and be no better for it.

slack line

Each week Muriel gave us writing as well as reading assignments, and we would go over class poems as well as poems by Whitman, Keats, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams. Once when someone read a poem that had a very weak line, a line without much in it, Muriel called the line "slack," and we could see the line sagging there in the poem, without tension, nothing that an acrobat would trust her life to.

Then she said, “No one wants to read poetry. No one wants to!” (With her good-humored energetic pessimism that felt like optimism). “You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down, impossible for them to stop reading it—word after word you have to keep them from closing the book. They want to close the book. And if it’s slack they’ll be able to—nothing says they have to read to the end. No one’s making them. And they don’t want to! They could be doing something else, like making a cheese sandwich! You have to make them want to go on reading with every word and every line.”

And Muriel said this cheerfully, the truth of it giving her voice energy. There was no whining in her about the place of poetry in America. It was just a reality, what was there for us to work with.

—Sharon Olds, “A Student’s Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2020)

worse before it gets better

You could make this poem better by making it worse.

slippery poetry

Any poetry you can name, I can describe an opposite kind.

standard mistake

It’s common to mistake one’s taste for a standard.

face it

When it comes to poetry. all genre considerations are off.

prune it back

As in gardening so it is in poetry, one should not be afraid to cut back the growth.

nice nice

No one seems to want to call out a bad poem.

pure presence

a poem is something in the midst of a white plane
fenced in by itself and enclosed by the surface of its lines.
although it has forgotten where and how it came to be,
it is no lost soul
[…]
a pure presence
each poem is a shell around a kernel possibly invented
each poem is a translation of the one poem that exists only in translation
each poem is its own condition
a poem is that which declares itself to be a poem

—Jutta Schutting, the start and ending of “Poems,” from In der Sprache der Inseln, Contemporary Austrian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press, 1986), edited and translated by Beth Bjorklund

seen via envy

Parody is jealousy with an illuminating purpose.

show 'em hell

After their first portfolios were turned in, the creative writing teacher thought one of the students must have misheard the admonishment “Show, don’t tell,” as “Show ‘em hell.”

sparsely furnished

For my living space all I require for furnishings are a bed and a bookcase.

mind to matter

The poem lives in the mind as aspiration, and resides on the page as a compromise.

different reading

Reading a play is another kind of reading.

narrative explained

A narrative poem carries a story however unconventionally it’s told.

aide-memoire

Forty years later Jonathan Swift wrote, in his Advice to a Young Poet, that ‘a commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without’, for ‘poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories’.

—Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 2024)

odd entries

Search engines have made them obsolete and yet I have trouble letting go of my collection of reference books. From my reference books what I miss now are those odd entries catching my eye as I went paging through them toward whatever it was I was hunting for.

you can get there

If you really know the end of the poem, then you can get there.

way leads on to way

There are books you mean to read but never get to, and those you read and mean to reread but never do, and so it goes like Frost’s famous lines, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”

she brushed your brow

A line like a mother’s hand passed over your brow.

be a picker

Poet, be a picker. Find the worth in what others throw away

adjectives arise

Start a review of a book of poems by listing all the adjectives that come to mind while reading the book.

lack of urban planning

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein associated language with "an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

seen for what it is

To be acknowledged and accepted, not only must the work of art be created, but it must be seen (experienced); and seen through the correct cultural lens.

runes and ruins

A notebook of runes, ruins.

lowered into the depths

Lines like a trawler's nets lowered into the depths of the psyche—no telling what they’ll dredge up.

top down

Your title is cliché…it’s all going downhill from there.

never expedient

Poetry as exposition that eschews expediency.

aesthetic cage

Don’t forget that one’s aesthetic can be one’s cage.

captains courageous

The courage of good criticism.

thirty years

Today we held a thirtieth anniversary reading of the poets who have met at my house since early 1995. I told someone after the reading, how much I valued the 'soft deadline' of having to press an inchoate poem into in a presentable state before the weekly meeting.

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
-
I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
-
If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
-
I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
-
Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
-
Books are made out of books.
-
Language is always an abbreviation.
-
The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
-
When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
-
Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
-
Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
-
The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
-
A poem is just a shape.
-
The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

large language models

Poets have been making use of AI LLMs for ages, just more slowly than racks of servers.

inferred from life

A good line of poetry is an inference from experience.

not supposed to be there

A sneaky, chameleon-like line that hid itself in the poem and evaded cross-out.

start scrubbing

I can easily imagine this piece as an erasure poem.

way of thought

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
     thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
     to me
Have made poetry.

—George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” [section 9], The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 1971)

unusual path

A poem by the language less travelled.

the many vs. the few

Spew words versus few words: the dialectic of contemporary poetry.

where poems come from

I have three children, but I only write about the troubled one.

doesn't stand up

A poetry of lame polemics.

who wrote that

I’ve got nothing to write about right now. Good thing my notebook has some half-formed notions and false starts that someone has recorded in my handwriting.

counting house poet

Chaucer’s poetic career in the years after 1372 shows how closely the movement of vernacular literary ideas tracked with the Italians’ international trading networks, and his work embodies that trade in ideas, frequently using accountancy—a young, exciting discipline—as a metaphor for moral reckoning. Noting how important those ideas were to Chaucer, his biographer Marion Turner goes so far as to call him, ‘the poet of the counting house’.

—Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 2024)

not much to go on

A poem may start with a premise, or only a promise.

elements unfolding

In a poem what matters is how the elements unfold.

ambulance chasing

The ambulance chasing poet was always first to write about the latest disaster.

too narrow a margin

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Theorem

I have a truly marvelous draft of this poem which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Poem

charged line

The poetic line must be continuously charged.

allow it to happen

Let’s have fewer ‘generative’ workshops and more that are inspirational.

age overturned

The movement to free verse at start of the twentieth century, the turning away from regular meters and rhyme schemes, was much like the great shift in painting that occurred in the late 1200s in Italy. Driven by Cimabue and then Giotto, it brought naturalism into painting that too long had relied on the formulas that make early paintings look stilted and unreal to modern eyes.

image of note

London’s unsteady skyline
was not a reassuring one
but like a graph that measures
markets, snails and heartbeats.

—Fanny Howe, second stanza of “Primrose for X” from Love and I (Graywolf Press, 2019)

high perch

Model for a line of poetry: First, imagine a high perch, and then arrange some songbirds along its length.

very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

speed bumps ahead

Not speed reading, reading poetry should impede the reader.

burst bubble

When the poetry bubble burst no one lost any money.

turn to poetry

Note to celebrities who turn to poetry: Leave it to the poets, those language toilers who will never have the least measure of your fame.

cliché tweaked

In some cases it makes sense not to cut the cliché but to twist it, to repurpose it, making its application more acceptable.

bright nothings

A litany of incandescent inanities.

pretend no one will see

She had recently turned seventy, which may have been weighing on her more than she thought. Many friends she would show her work to are dead, she'd noticed lately. “So it’s like, who cares? You have to have someone waiting for you.” And readers? “If I think about them, I can’t write anything. When I write a poem, I have to pretend no one will see it.”

I asked what emotion was most productive for her work—sadness? happiness? “Loneliness,” she answered quickly.

Her best writing comes when, she said, she is “in my nightgown for days, not thinking about anyone else. It takes a couple of days just thrashing through the brambles to get to any type of clearing, and it’s very painful. It’s frustrating, you see all your limitations, but a lot of what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you if you mean it. I like it once I settle in, but the borders are tough.” Once she passes into the other state, “that’s the best feeling in the world—we’re utterly ourselves and we’re nobody.”

Marie Howe being quoted in The Work of Art: how something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

not much

How much I love a poem made by the least means.

the way in

In poetry, surprise is often a matter of perspective.