going there

A poet doesn’t know what’s ineffable.

poems distilled

15
Memory is the purest form of imagination.
(Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”)

45

Anyone can be a gun, but it takes a poet to go off half-cocked.
(Dickinson, 768)

169

Finding a poem in a blank page is like finding a snowman in flakes still falling from the sky.
(Stevens, “The Snow Man”)

321

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.
(Ginsberg, “Howl”)

454

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

(L. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again")

464

Sometimes we have to die many times to figure out how we want to live.
(Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)

—George Murray, Quick (ECW Press, 2017)

no contest

Don’t tell me about your petty prizes. I want to read your incontestable poem.

too much

The poem was perfumed music.

essence of

Squeeze a parable and get a proverb.

deep meaning

A poem that was smart all the way down to the level of etymology.

poet's lot

His therapist assured him that being an unknown poet was not something to be ashamed of.

contemporaneity

George Steiner often insists that the concept of “contemporaneity” should be taken into serious consideration. For instance, it is crucial to know that Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire lived at the exact same time in order to understand the deep relevance of one’s work to the other’s. Manet’s fascination with eroticism and modernity coexisted with a more classical touch, which was rooted in a long tradition of painting. In that sense, when his oeuvre was presented in 2011 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, naming him the “man who invented modernity,” such a claim could only be accurate if related to the perpetuation of certain traditions. Modernity exists alongside tradition. And Baudelaire stands in a similar position. The literary critic Antoine Compagnon famously described his poems as “antimodern,” meaning that they were written as much in contradiction to as in close relation to modernity. Therefore, Baudelaire’s poems and Manet’s paintings, which may seem to be produced in parallel realities, indeed have a lot in common.

—Donatien Grau, The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

gnarled lines

With its many digressions, the poem tied itself up in knots.

step back

The poet talks the prose line back from the edge.

well-wrought ask

A question must be composed better than a statement.

not a transcendent act

I was going to suggest that 'This poem needs to molt its form.' Then I realized that act is not a metamorphosis.

cross purposes

When the narrative intersects with the random.

requisite equine

I put horses in poems, but I’ve never ridden one. They just seem like a good thing to put into literature.

—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Graywolf Press, 2017)

shared dream

I thought she said the poem was “dream of consciousness.”

word hose

That line was a firehose of words…