singularly ignored

Your poetry has avoided influence but I’m afraid it has escaped interest as well.

made out of mist

A poem accomplished however implausible in its conception.

one line elegy

The mailbox shines calmly: what is written cannot be taken back.

—Tomas Tranströmer, “Late May,” translated by Robert Bly

enemy me

P.S.: You have said that being a very good craftsman is a problem for you as a poet. How is this so?

Wright: Because my chief enemy in poetry is glibness. My family background is partly Irish, and this mean many things, but linguistically it means that it is too easy to talk sometimes. I keep thinking of Horace's idea which Byron so accurately expressed in a letter to Murray: "Easy writing is damned hard reading." I suffer from glibness. I speak and write too easily. Stanley Kunitz has been a master of mine, and he tells me that he suffers from the same problem. His books are very short, as mine are, and he has struggled and struggled to strip them down. There are poets, I have no doubt, who achieve some kind of natural gift, the difficulty that one needs. Because whatever else poetry is, it is a struggle, and the enemy, the deadly enemy of poetry, is glibness. And that is why I have struggled to strip my poems down.

—James Wright, in a 1972 interview with Peter Stitt, James Wright: A Profile (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1988) edited by Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt.

image inside

The psyche has an internal projector of remembered images.

fled sentencing

It was one of those sentences happened upon in prose that you recognize immediately as a line of fugitive poetry.

page turned

An anthology of poems that had fallen out of the anthologies.

witnesses for the defense

There was no framed diploma on the wall of his office. But sometimes he would run a finger bumping along the spines of the books in his personal library. He thought these authors, though most long dead, must vouch for him.

four elements

In the first place his poem must be deeply conceived, and be unvaryingly self-consistent. Then he must take pains to temper all with variety (varietas), for there is no worse mistake than to glut your hearer before you are done with him. What then are the dishes which would create distaste rather than pleasure? The third poetic quality is found in but few writers, and is what I would term vividness (efficacia);….By vividness I mean a certain potency and force in thought and language which compels one to be a willing listener. The fourth is winsomeness (suavitas), which tempers the ardency of this last quality, of itself inclined to be harsh. Insight and foresight (prudentia), variety, vividness, and winsomeness, these, then, are the supreme poetic qualities.

—Giulio Cesare Scaligero (1484-1558), “The Four Attributes of the Poet,” Select Translations from Scaliger's Poetics (H. Holt, 1905), translated Frederick Morgan Padelford

nothing comes from nothing

The efficacy of any revision depends solely on having a solid core to work with.

singular thing

The sonnet is a stand-alone poem. It should never be impressed as a stanza in sequence.

important poem

A poem that was a monument in the collective consciousness.

ring wrong

His rhymes were unexpected, but in that bad way of being right by sound but off in tone or out of sorts with the diction.

desire finds its object

Soliloquies. Arias. Father-son dramatic agon. Symphonies—whatever we crave to experience over and over as we discover what art can be. Love buries these ghost-forms within us. Forms are the language of desire before desire has found its object.

—Frank Birdart, “Thinking Through Form,” Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (U. of Michigan Press, 1996), edited by David Lehman.

me me how about me

Too many poets are of and only for the self.

well-matched forces

Written in a way that alternates seamlessly between control and flow.

too close for the cold eye

A friend’s review: a freview.

foothold on the heights

It was not just a book, it was a step on to Parnassus.

ready for I

...I'm just really beginning to let myself say "I" because I feel that now I can do it without the kind of crudity with which some people who have just begun to write poetry write about their feelings.

I always feel that what…people should be doing, if they really want to be poets, is writing objectively. Writing about a chair, a tree outside their window. So much more of themselves really would get into the poem, than when they just say “I.” The “I-ness” doesn’t come across, because it’s too crude…For instance, the objective earlier poems of William Carlos Williams (who, in the ripeness of old age has been saying “I” in quite a different way) say so much more than what they superficially appear to be saying. They’re quite objective little descriptions of this and that, and yet, especially when one adds them together, they say a great deal about the man. In a much deeper more impressive way than if he if he’d spent the same years describing his emotions.

—Denise Levertov, in an interview with David Ossman, The Sullen Art (Corinth Books, 1963), interviews with modern American poets.

fail better

When a poem fails and you don’t know why, it’s worth saving the pieces and starting over.

line, angle, speed & show factor

You could watch his line 'drift' as he headed into the turn.

never mine

The poem you admire because you wish you’d written it. The poem you admire because you know you never could’ve written it.

so shall you be judged

This poem will be on your permanent record.

mischievous poetry

Give praise with children
           chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
Living wild on the streets through generations
           of children.

—Anne Porter, from “A List of Praises,” An Altogether Different Language: Poems 1934-1994 (Zoland Books, 1994)