4.30.2016

spells, prayers, songs

The belief that words in themselves have the power to make things happen—especially words in extraordinary combinations—is one of the distinguishing features of native American thought; and it may be said that for people who share this belief a connection exists between the sacred and the verbal, or, to put it in more familiar terms, a connection between religion and poetry.

When the connection is broken, poetry begins to lose its audience. It may still be admired, but it comes to be recognized as a form of self-expression, unable to establish contact with supernatural forces. Not surprisingly, the word ‘poetry,’ as it is understood in English today, has no precise equivalent in native American languages. What are thought of by outsiders as Indian “poems” are actually spells, prayers, or words to songs.

—John Bierhorst, introduction to The Sacred Path: Spells, Prayers & Power Songs of the American Indians (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1983)

4.29.2016

approximal readings

No one knew what the poem was about. But each reading was about right.

4.28.2016

press on

One never finishes a perfect poem.

4.27.2016

poetry is poetry written

The poet defines poetry in the making of the poem.

4.26.2016

adequate containers

Words just poured out of him, and thus his books were like buckets.

4.25.2016

reader falling behind

This process, Pushkin feels, can lead the poet to greater isolation even as the work becomes more insightful and accomplished:

He creates for himself, and if his works are still published from time to time, he encounters coldness or inattention, and he finds an echo of his sounds only in the hearts of a few admirers of poetry, who, like himself, are secluded and forgotten by the world.

Akhmatova takes this for a description of Pushkin as much as for a description of Baratynsky. "All of Pushkin's contemporaries enthusiastically recognized themselves in the hero of The Prisoner of the Caucasus," she writes, "but who would agree to recognize himself in Eugene from The Bronze Horseman?" While she doesn't overtly compare the drop in her literary reputation to the drop in Pushkin's, she draws a broad conclusion with her own situation clearly in mind: "Thus, it is not so much that poetry is static, as that the reader does not keep pace with the poet."

—Kevin Frazier, “A Posthumous Collaboration: Anna Akhmatova’s Relationship with Puskin,” review of My Half Century: Selected Prose (The Overlook Press; reprint edition 2012) by Anna Akhmatova (Ronald Meyer, trans.), bookslut, January 2013.

4.24.2016

faces in the crowd

Some say the process of composition is the most exciting, but it pales compared to seeing a rapt audience hanging on your every word.

4.23.2016

singular image

Seek the specific not the generic image.

4.21.2016

contested space

One might ask: Was ever a country’s canon created from contest winners?

4.20.2016

crazy craft

When craft transcends control and becomes obsession, it starts to get interesting again.

4.18.2016

pure and applied

The ‘pure’ is the imagination, the ‘applied’ is the craft.

4.17.2016

stop short

A popular form of Chinese poetry is the four-line poem called the stop-short, in which the sense is supposed to continue after the poem has stopped. But even in the longer poems that is almost universally the method. It is the hum of reverberations, after the poem has been read, that is sought for. And even such a narrative poem as Po Chü I’s Everlasting Wrong, one of the famous “long” poems of the language (though it runs only to few pages), is constructed in accordance with this instinct, and is, therefore, really a sequence of lyrics.

—Conrad Aiken, “Arthur Waley,” A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present (Meridian Books, 1958)

4.15.2016

loose words

The dictionary is dead. Long live the language at large.

4.14.2016

eyes open

Each day a poet wakes with new eyes for the same world.

4.13.2016

latticework canon

As poems multiply and lodge themselves in various media, each of us creates a latticework of connections—a poem here, a poem there, a poem over there—that will in time become one's personal canon.

4.12.2016

influence further

A poet who can’t be influenced can’t advance.

4.11.2016

revised horizon

He’d reached a point in his life when he had more poems in draft form than he had days left to revise and to finish them.

4.10.2016

emotional memory

Recalling the way a work of art made me feel is often more durable than other kinds of memory. I can often remember how I felt when I read a novel, for example, without having a good recollection of its plot. What remains after looking at a painting is not an exact imprint of the image in the mind, but rather the feeling it gave me, a feeling that I sometimes must struggle to name because emotions as experienced in the body are often cruder than the words we assign to them. Visceral responses to an image, however, are inevitably avenues to meaning. It isn’t always clear why a picture affects us the way it does, but for me, pursuing that mystery is the single most fruitful way to discovery. As Henry James once wrote, “In the arts, feeling is meaning.”

—Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)

4.09.2016

bestest mostest etc

Hyberbollocks: Exaggerated nonsensical praise, often evidenced by the author’s blurbs.

4.07.2016

word forge

Like Homer’s shield of Achilles, give me language metallurgy.

[Homer's The Iliad, Book XVIII, "The Shield of Achilles," Alexander Pope translation.]

4.03.2016

best seller

The poet’s publisher called with some exciting news: “Your book is selling in the hundreds!”

4.02.2016

game changer

It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens. When I was very young, reading Shakespeare and Blake and Keats, or when, in adolescence, I began reading Yeats and Eliot and Pound, my experience of reading invariably strengthened an existing sense of vocation. Because this experience, the fact that reading great poets increased my confidence, never varied, I had no reason to examine it. Then something completely different happened; then a door was shut very sharply. Reading Stevens, I felt I would never write, and because I didn’t want this to be true, I had to look more closely at those early experiences, and at the new, to find the source of the verdict.

--Louise Glück, “Invitations and Exclusions,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)