first, second or third

All poems, cast in first, second or third person, are persona poems.

knew too much

He worried that he knew too much about how poems work to write one.

physical response

I think it’s that combustible interaction between the arbitrary imagination and the real that produces Dickinson’s physical response, a sensation I myself have had, once on a plane after reading the first pages of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s book-length poem, Alphabet. Reading those first few lines, I felt a fizzy, rushing heat rise from my stomach to my throat. I couldn’t wait to read the next page, and the next, and the next. It also made me want to re-create this experience in words for myself.

Another way of saying it: I know I’m in the presence of poetry when I, too, want to write it.

—Paisley Rekdal, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically (Norton, 2024)

poets resist

By definition a poet resists word prediction.

felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

pin it

Poet, pin it all on one poem.

no free writer

He didn’t free write. He only wrote when a poem, however uncertain or half-formed, arose in him and wanted to be made.

mind poem

I wrote the poem in my mind and there it stayed.

ars longa odds

A bad wager to put it all on art over life.

repetitions or rhymes

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, could be rescued from distraction only by finding certain repetitions or rhymes in this experience….Thus he required two phenomena to reveal to him one essence, as if essences needed to appear a second time in order to appear at all. A mind less volatile and retentive, but more concentrated and loyal, might easily have discerned the eternal essence in any single momentary fact. It might also have felt the scale of values imposed on things by human nature, and might have been carried towards some by an innate love and away from others by a quick repulsion: something which in Proust is remarkably rare. Yet this very inhumanity and innocent openness, this inclination to be led on by endlessly rambling perception, makes his testimony to the reality of essences all the more remarkable. We could not have asked for a more competent or more unexpected witness to the fact that life as it flows is so much time wasted, and that nothing can ever be recovered or truly possessed save under the form of eternity which is also, as he tell us, the form of art.

—George Santayana, “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz

[The above quote could be applied to the poetry of John Ashbery.]

believe before be

Before the poem can be, it must be an utterance you believe in.

unlikely impetus

Look to the verbiage of signs, menus, instruction manuals, ingredient labels, fabric tags, etc.— any odd text that may be the impetus for a poem.

feature not flaw

A line that doesn’t make sense in a poem is a feature not a flaw. It shakes the reader from the rote act of reading.

last things

In his journal for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (7 March 1961), Merton wrote, "Determined to write less, to gradually vanish." He added, at the end of that entry, "The last thing I will give up writing will be this journal and notebooks and poems. No more books of piety."

Quoted by Frederick Smock in his essay “Merton and Silence,” The Merton Journal, 2008, volume 15 number 1

one pure word

One pure word could cure this poem.

both known and felt

Any long poem of worth will be known by its passages while being felt as a whole.

me or the beam

Most poets want to tell their own stories while a few want to illuminate the world.

poetics in four words

Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Pied Beauty” gave the best statement of a poetics: “All things counter, original, spare, strange...”

nothing there

That poem in the ether must not preclude your writing of the real poem.

it's dark inside

The sewer system that is interiority.

measured response

It was a polite political poem.

shades of red

Vergil maintained delicate distinctions in his poetry for particular shades of red he saw: ruber, sanquineus, roseus, cruentus, rutilus, and sandyx. Ovid liked cruor (blood) and mavors (poetic for Mars).

—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors (Henry Holt & Co., 1994)

had a pulse

Because a few iambs continued to beat inside the poem the poet was able to bring it back to life.

like anyone's life

If a poet wore a bodycam you’d be surprised how boring the recording was.

what art must do

Like in the lyrics to that Evanescence song (Bring Me to Life), the charge to all artists and poets should be: “Wake me up inside.”

blotted letters

Clotted with words, it was a blot poem.

indeterminate inflorescence

59.
I say this often, but a poem is collection of words that were trying to get away. When you’re joining the next line to the previous one, the new line has to be the same as the old but different. You’ll know what the last line is only when you get there. Like how you’ll know how you die only when you die.

61.
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

110.
Truth, goodness, and beauty exist in a symmetrical structure within the object. Observe Hongyemun Gate. It has no supporting structure and simply exists in a structure of itself. Once the structure of an object is discovered, there is no need for any other rhetoric or embellishment. There isn’t much else that needs to be done.

146.
Unlike army soldiers, navy sailors grow their hair a little longer. It’s easier that way to grab onto when pulling them out of the water. That’s what details are like. The things that decide life or death have always been the smallest things.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (ALLEN LANE/Penguin, 2023), translated by Anton Hur

odds are against

A poem has as much chance of being perfect as the person who composed it has.

universal resources

The poet has a vocabulary and experience enough for a universe.

not under warranty

Bad rejection: We are mailing back most of your manuscript because our office’s paper shredder shuddered and stopped working after the first handful of pages were fed into it.

language unleashed

The poem being a force of language.

between sense and nonsense

It is clear that the poem [Kubla Khan] does not make sense. It would be impossible, for example, to draw a map of the pleasure dome, though many have tried. A ‘chasm’ that slants down a green hill ‘athwart a cedarn cover’ is hard to visualise. On the other hand, the poem does make sense to the extent that it is composed of sentences that work grammatically. It is not a collection of random words assembled by free association, as the work of the French Symbolist poets at times seems to be. Coleridge was a profoundly learned thinker and critic as well as a poet, and in ‘Kubla Khan’ he has discovered the space between sense and nonsense where great poetry lies.

—John Carey, 100 Poets: A Little Anthology (Yale U. Press, 2021)

radiant theme

Even when not explicitly stated, the theme radiates from the poem.

killer lyric

Poet, write the killer lyric.

moved by sound

The kind of poem that while reading it silently you can feel your lips and tongue begin to move.

mister fix-it

After a leg broke off the old table, he fixed it with what had at hand: a stack of books under one corner stabilized it nicely.

pure poet

I met a pure poet once. He dressed the part: A thrift store wool vest over a white shirt and beaten jeans. He was someone who wrote poems and worked as a cook in a restaurant. I don’t think he was ever recognized for his poetry in his lifetime. But I recognized him as a poet the first time I heard him read.

small door

The door
We go through—
So small.

The rooms
We enter—immense.

—Gregory Orr, The City of Poetry (Sarabande Books, Quarternote Chapbook Series #10. 2012)

spent life

I’ve spent most of my adult life devoted to poetry, and still how little I know.

poor substitute

In literary works imagination proves to be a poor substitute for experience.

heard them coming

I could hear your rhymes coming, and by the time they landed, I had already found several preferable alternatives.

too smooth

Always the desire to smooth when to disturb would improve the work.

slow approach

When the scholars find a work of art they approach it like archaeologists.

true poems

Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I turn the pages of my own poems gathered in a single volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the old verse that says it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not what I have written but what I should like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have not had the strength to realize.

—Wallace Stevens, acceptance speech at 1955 National Book Awards ceremony (for The Collected Poems, Knopf, 1954)

design + build

Another way to think of poetic form: Not as a template passed down through time, but something designed and built by the language of a particular poem.

remembered poems

Poets make poems but readers make remembered poems.

poetic metaphysics

We can expose the poem’s inner working, and yet not know it fully. Not unlike the soul which we feel but cannot locate within the human body.

cut it

Poet, don’t end the poem—just cut it.

minor bang

A haiku is a pocket universe.

must be precise

#61
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023), translation by Anton Hur

faux po

A poem full of fraud words.

squeeze box

You can tell when the poet is squeezing the language to get a sigh or shriek out of it. Let the emotional content in the writing arise without pressing on the material.

finale-less

Often I’ve left a fireworks show with the sense that the whole experience would have been better without the lighting off of the grand finale. It’s something to consider when concluding a poem.

words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

essential experience

Imagination fails the further it gets from experience.

early risers

The dawn is a term for the early morning used by poets and other people who don’t have to get up.

—Oliver Herford

flash to ash

The poem composed in a flash, and any revision would leave only ash.

dead dead

He went back to revise the poem not realizing rigor mortis had set in.

from other tongues

Often it’s non-native speakers who write the most beautiful English sentences.

root cellar

You haven’t gone down to basement of this poem. There's a root cellar with a door hanging by one hinge and some cobwebs waiting to be pushed open.

worth the effort

Spend the time revising this poem, or just spin up a new one.

gifting library

Don’t ask me how many books I own—ask how many I’ve read and passed on.

poet praising poet

I love a good homage poem—a poet praising another poet—knowing how hard it is to write even a few poems that make themselves known and at the same time matter.

other voice

I am asserting that poetry is irreducible to ideas and system. It is the other voice. Not the word of history or of antihistory but the voice that, in history, always says something else—the same something since the beginning. I don’t know how to define this voice or explain what it is that constitutes this difference, this tone which, though it doesn’t set it altogether apart, makes it unique and distinct. I will say only that it is strangeness and familiarity in person. We need only hear it to recognize it.

—Octavio Paz, “Latin-American Poetry,” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987)

stands aside

The poet stands aside: Someone standing in the shadow of the doorway, waiting for hours for who knows what.

light fare

He’d tasted some of this, some of that,
but he never made a meal of one book,
nor had he ever feasted for days
at the banquet of an author’s oeuvre.

is quantum

All translation is quantum.

reel off

When you realize you can really write, I mean you can reel off line after line effortlessly, that’s when you need to set some limits.

more than speech

When reading your poetry consider: enunciation, pace, pauses (silence), tone and modulation. Some poets aren’t blessed with pleasing voices, but they can thoughtfully manage their speech patterns to better present their poetry.

inspired reader

A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized—or at least everyone recognizes his own poet—by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.

—Paul Valéry, “Poetry of Abstract Thought” (1939), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 (Wesleyan U. Press, 2004), edited by Melissa Kwasny

empty basket

Each time I passed the poet busking in the square he seemed to be getting thinner.

detail minded to death

A writer is someone who even fusses over the font style of his gravestone.

workshop is

Workshop: Eight to ten people talking about a poem none of them could’ve written.

kinds of containers

A poem to me is a container whether it be benign like a water pitcher or dangerous like a pipe bomb.

theme and form

I always have two things in my head—I always have a theme and the form. The form looks for the theme, the theme looks for the form, and when they come together you’re able to write.

—W.H. Auden, “Obiter Dicta,” W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 1995) by Charles Osborne