obviously magnificent

You can’t explain the poem: you can’t say what it’s about, you can’t even make a claim for it as a poem, yet it manifests itself in the space of the page and declares itself magnificent.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

pulled out stops

A poem unimpeded by punctuation.

[Thinking of W.S. Merwin]

style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

one and many

A poem should not be overly varied but poetry should be various in order not to bore us.

poem as brick

A poem made from mutable clay of human existence but solid as brick.

hard to read

Your layout didn’t improve the poem but it was successful in making it harder to read.

what they don't say

Gamblers don’t talk about their losses and poets don’t talk about their rejections.

to declare or to disclose

Too many poems declare themselves outright when a slow disclosure would be more effective.

living things

Another poetic requirement, necessary to emphasize since reading and writing became almost universal throughout the English-speaking area fifty years ago, is that every word must be given its full meaning. In commercial, scientific, and newspaper prose there is an increasing tendency to use words as mere counters, stripping them of their history and force and associations—as one might use a box of old foreign coins in a card game without regard for their date, country, face-value or intrinsic value. The creative side of poetry consists of treating words as if they were living things—in coupling them and making them breed new life.

—Robert Graves, “Preface to a Reading of Poems,” Food for the Centaurs (Doubleday, 1960)

person or the poetry

It’s the editor’s dilemma: The feeling that you’re not judging the poetry but the poet’s life.

prose poem test

The prose poem is the true test of a poem: Could the piece be unlineated and still be a good poem.

mind to paper

One of those poems of the mind that evaporates on paper.

my life

So many poets who think their life stories are important.

locates in space

Like a bat, the poem echolocates in space.

capitalism's mouthpiece

A post-mo poem that capitulates to capitalism at every turn with a product placement or brand name.

poet's grave

[Scene takes place at a ruined monastery that has been turned into a prison camp]

     From all others, Yakov Petrovich Polonsky chose this place as his own and gave instructions that he was to be buried here. Man, it seems, has always been prone to the belief that his spirit will hover over his grave and gaze down on the peaceful countryside around it.
     But the domed churches have gone; the half of the stone walls that is left has been made up in height by a plank fence with barbed wire, and the whole of this ancient place is dominated by those sickeningly familiar monsters: watchtowers. There is a guardhouse in the monastery gateway, and a poster that says, “Peace among Nations,” with a Russian workman holding a little black girl in his arms.
[…, speaking to the warder]
     “Tell me—according to the map, there’s a poet called Polonsky buried here. Where is his grave?”
     “You can’t see Polonsky. He’s inside the perimeter.”
     So Polonsky was out of bounds. What else was there to see? A crumbling ruin? Wait, though—the warder was turning to his wife: “Didn’t they dig Polonsky up?”
     “Mm. Took him to Ryazan.” The woman nodded from the porch as she cracked sunflower seeds with her teeth.
     The warder thought this was a great joke: “Seems he’d done his time—so they let him out . . .”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Ashes of a Poet,” Stories and Prose Poems (FSG, 1971), translated by Michael Glenny, p. 249

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

subject suspect

Subject matter matters more than most poets allow.

off message

Unlike politicians, poets never stay on message.

burst of history

Poems burst forth with their history.

signs and wonders

Mostly a poem is signs and wonders.

language preceding language

One of [Dada’s] founders, the German poet Hugo Ball tells how, on June 23, 1916, in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, hiding his face behind a mask by Hans Arp, he recited, to the astonishment, indignation, and fascination of the audience, a phonetic poem consisting entirely of nonsense syllables and meaningless words. Ball’s experience, as he himself recounts it, lucidly and with feeling bordering on religious trance; it was a regression to the magic spell, or more precisely, to a language preceding language: “With those poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism. We returned to the profound alchemy of the Word, beyond words, thus preserving poetry within its last sacred domain.”

—Octavio Paz, "Reading and Contemplation," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

sounds found a way

The sounds found a way to move the poem forward.

winged lines

If a writer is to avoid oblivion and to live on, it will be on the wings of quote marks.

no sleep

The poet will not let you sleep.

mad meantime

In a perfect world no political poetry would be written. In the mad meantime, we must ‘write’ the wrongs.

attention to the overlooked

It was said of her that she paid attention to the overlooked things.

not really imperfect

…Japanese poets and painters might say with Yves Bonnefoy: imperfection is the acme of achievement. The imperfection, as has been noted, is not really imperfect: it is a voluntary act of leaving unfinished. Its true name is awareness of the fragility and precariousness of existence, an awareness of that which knows itself to be suspended between one abyss and another. Japanese art, in its most tense and transparent moments, reveals to us those instants—because each is only that, an instant—of perfect equilibrium between life and death. Vivacity: mortality.

—Octavio Paz, "The Tradition of the Haiku," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

faster round and round

The poem was a whirlpool of circumlocution.

first river to cross

Your first line should be your Rubicon.

wild encounter

I’ll pay attention when I’m startled by a poem of yours that I've encountered in the wild.

slow to disclose

A poem should not immediately disclose itself as a poem.

rounded-upon-itself

What sort of a poet can this be, who is ‘traditional’ and ‘yet has no poetic forerunners’? We solve this riddle by saying that in his techniques Mandelstam was indeed unprecedented, yet the techniques were made to serve a form—why not say simply, a beauty?—that rejoiced in calling upon every precedent one might think of, from Homer to Ovid, to the builders of Santa Sophia, to Dante and Ariosto and Racine. For it is true, surely: the sort of form to which Mandelstam vows himself alike in nature and in art, the form of the bent-in and the rounded-upon-itself, is the most ancient and constant of all European understandings of the beautiful—it is what long ago recognised in the circle the image of perfection.

—Donald Davie, foreword to Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Press, 1989), translated by James Greene

first poet

The moon was the earth’s first poet.

no library card

He would go to the library to write and to read books, but he wouldn’t check any of them out—wouldn’t take them home—where he had too many books to read in one lifetime.

too fast to last

Haste is the enemy of important art.

filmic language

The poem as film made language.

is foundation

When you reach the last line you should feel it as foundation for the whole poem.

questions without answers

I have sat through many Q & A’s after poetry readings and have always been bored. I am against Q & A’s; I believe the poetry audience should be allowed to sit with the feelings and imaginings evoked by the poetry itself, should go home with them, and let them nourish their dream life.

—Doug Anderson, essay “In Praise of Aporia,” published in Plume #164 April 2025 plumepoetry.com

forgive them

Forgive them, for they know not what they write.

poem eater

An image can eat a whole poem.

taught right

Been lucky not to have been taught by teachers without their own ideas.

rope-ladder

To read a good poem is like climbing down a rope-ladder, line by line never sure there is another length below you that can hold you, and not sure it reaches all the way to the ground.

two kinds of reaching

Here are…two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes–with strength of expression and skill and luck–reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.

—Muriel Rukeyser, from her Preface to The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw-Hill, 1978)

siblings

Force and form are close kin.

literary landfill

Writers are unable or unwilling to dispose of large batches of their work. Instead they persist in publishing anything and everything they can, thus they create the conditions that cause even their best pieces to be covered up in the sheer volume of work out in the world. It’s not easy to spot a gold watch in a landfill.

not mine anymore

Be justly proud of the poem you discarded.

poor prayers

We bring our poems, paltry offerings at the altar of language, in hope that some part of the immense mystery is revealed.

good counsel

The reviewer stated, “No excerpt from this book could do it justice.” This is like the defense lawyer who, being worried about self-incrimination, doesn’t want her/his defendant to take the stand.

dubious book promotion

Here’s some notable marketing copy by Wave Books:

"...Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow."

Makes you want to buy the book, doesn't it?

markson notes

Ferdinand Magellan is credited with first circumnavigating the earth. It's not well known that his ship returned to Spain without him. Magellan died about two-thirds through the voyage, far from returning to his starting point in Spain, having been killed in fighting on an island called Cebu.

Directing the filming of Spartacus (1960), Stanley Kubrick dismissed his cinematographer Russell Metty and took over shooting himself. By contract Kubrick wasn’t able to erase Metty’s name from the credits. Spartacus didn’t win an Oscar for best picture, nor did Kubrick get the award for best director. Metty, however, won the Oscar for best cinematography.

Thomas Hardy’s wife wrote to a friend of theirs: “Tom’s in a very good mood today. He’s just written the most melancholy poem!”

all about me

A poet who had memorized many poems, all his.

be the prey

Better are poems that sneak up on you, and not the ones you must hunt.

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.