6.30.2017

thin thing

Slide a poem under the door.

6.29.2017

no afterlife

Often the poems will die with the poet. And sometimes the poems go first.

6.28.2017

decibel level

No deep truth has ever been shouted.

—Juan Ramon JimĂ©nez, The Complete Perfectionist: The Poetics of Work, translated and edited by Christopher Maurer (Doubleday, 1997), p. 150.

6.27.2017

four-legged audience

Being a poet, sometimes he found himself reading to empty chairs.

6.26.2017

author of itself

A poem should have the virulent integrity of Coriolanus.

6.25.2017

untouched by any other

An image so whole and complete unto itself, that it would forever ignore the attraction of metaphor.

6.24.2017

new worlds

After a youth spent leafing through thick dictionaries, after so many years of reading across various genres, how is it I’m still discovering new words? Which is to say new worlds, as though a telescope trained on deep space as the faintest and most distant of stars slowly become visible.

6.23.2017

last words

The last line was epitaph of the poem.

6.22.2017

fighting up

That lyric could lick almost any long poem.

6.21.2017

wood product

It has been speculated that the English word “book” in fact comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for beech (boc), the favored material from which the panels of tablets were fashioned.

—Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2003)

6.19.2017

of another language

When the words become foreign to me.

6.18.2017

too soon

The blood hadn’t dried and already the poet tried to memorialize the terrible event.

6.17.2017

long and strong

A long poem with the influence of the Old Testament.

6.15.2017

neither here nor there

The words are never where they're supposed to be.

6.11.2017

hit send

A post-mo email-quality epistle.

6.09.2017

no arbitrary boundary

He [Edgar Allan Poe] was so much against slavery that he had begun to include prose and poetry in the same book, so that there would be no arbitrary boundaries between them.

—Ishmael Reed (epigraph to Paul Metcalf’s Both, p378 in Collected Works, vol. II.)

[n.b.: Quote encountered while browsing a reading area in the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville, NC.]

6.04.2017

tell ail

Confessional poetry: Dire diary.

6.03.2017

thus said

A statement of taste spoken as though a truth statement.

6.02.2017

hard pressed

Oppression makes poets. In the land of perfect liberty songs are not pressed out of the heart.

Elia Peattie

6.01.2017

no turning away

He’d set out to write manifestly great poems: The dream of writing poems that upon first reading drew a devoted audience.