meanwhile elsewhere

He was a New York School poet stuck in Peoria: An I-don’t-do-this & I-don’t-do-that-either poet.

duly noted

A poem that annotated itself as it went along.

relative scale

A great poet from a small country. A minor poet from a large country.

sonic code

The poem as sonic coding.

no longer, not yet

My poetry doesn’t change from place to place—it changes with the years. It’s very important to be one’s age. You get ideas you have to turn down—‘I’m sorry, no longer’; ‘I’m sorry, not yet’.

—W. H. Auden, quoted in Words and Their Masters by Israel Shenker, with photographs by Jill Krementz (Doubleday & Co., 1974)

masthead

The program hired a masthead name not a poet, and certainly not a teacher.

purple and paisley

Purple in description and paisley in design.

no layoff

Poet’s Work


Grandfather
     advised me:
          Learn a trade

I learned
     to sit at a desk
          and condense

No layoff
     from this
          condensery

—Lorine Niedecker, Home/World

and not &

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry: Sounds somewhat warmed-over. It's not Blast or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, that's for sure. Academic style manuals perhaps ruled against use of the ampersand in the title.

zukofsky quoted at length

Departing from my usual brevity, today I've quoted (below) at length from the works of Louis Zukofsky. But doing so in a white typeface may prove difficult to read. For this I apologize.


"




















                            ."
—Louis Zukofsky

sweet slime

The line left a slime trail of syrupy poeticisms.

tagger

Poet, be a tagger of the walls of silence.

one poem, one life

To write a poem that would save a stranger’s life.

specific gravity

In poems words will naturally increase in semantic specific gravity.

train wreck

Train wreck critic.

not by image alone

The image is the magic lantern which lights up the poets in their darkness. But images aren’t alone. There are passages between them which also must be poetry.

—Jules Supervielle,”Thinking About a Poetics”
Mid-Century French Poets, edited by Wallace Fowlie (Grove Press, 1955)

tactically tactless

Political poems are bound to be impolite.

muybridge rhythms

One can learn poetic rhythms from Muybridge’s photographic sequences.

youth must be swerved

Pay attention to whatever the young poets are doing. Paying too much attention to what the young poets are doing.

shifty and suspicious

Develop a healthy distrust of metaphor. [See Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on this point. He thought a good metaphor was something even the constabulary should keep an eye on.]

not there yet

Grateful that literature hasn’t bored me into actually reading any Kenny Goldsmith.