low pressure system

Sitting down to write with that good feeling of a gathering storm.

word origins

You will need to know some etymology in order to access the poem’s full resources.

inexhaustible

One thought of the poem as a mineshaft, where many have descended into its dim-lit reaches to do their work, each bringing to the surface a few tons of material, and yet the veins radiate in many directions, and go on for indeterminate distances.

image framed

An image seen through curatorial aperture.

weeds

Milkweed

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At the touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.

—James Wright

maximaus

Another minor poet with major poet attitude.

ancient artifact

A typewritten poem had arrived by mail and the editors and staff passed it around the office asking if anyone knew what it was.

critical difference

Opinion expires in time. Analysis lasts.

buckle up

A first line that clicked like a race driver’s seat belt.

respectful attention

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what human do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a ‘clearing’, a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly steep forward like a deer from the trees…It would be simplistic to identify the clearing with human consciousness, but this is more or less the idea. We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them poetically, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will.

—Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (Other Press, 2016)

uses of language

A poet who allowed language to signify. A poet who asked language to sign in blood.

made statement

Even the shape of the poem had some swagger.

gaseous body

If this long poem was an astronomical body, it would be classified as a ‘gas giant’.

word of his own

The critic Maurice speaks of the pompatus of poetry.

[Steve Miller’s word]

no more than opinion

Yet poetry is still thought of, insistently, as a product, as something answering either to a determined definition or else to a use not necessarily its own. Gregory Corso rightly said that only the poet can validate him- or herself. There is no other reference or judgment that can give more than an opinion. Opinions are rightly and generously the response an art may depend upon, but they do not determine what it is or can be.

—Robert Creeley, “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” On Earth: Last poems and an essay (U. of California Press, 2006)

matter of

A poem of deceptive mass.

tight spot

Photographs are often cropped for better effect, and likewise poems too should be willing to give up some background in favor of compositional impact.

must be put down

Sometimes the critic must shoot the audience.

flaws of the first water

The poem’s flaws would have been features in lesser poems.

inner travel

Outer travel becomes the setting of inner travel, but if the mood is somewhat that of the Odyssey, the travelers are less able and confident than Odysseus, and the world less viable to purpose. The width of things and the isolation of the characters look forward to much in the Hellenistic Age, and even in the Aeneid, rather than back to the sureness of the Odyssey. Of the classical Greek writers, Euripides notably created a language for privacy of experience, and he paradoxically did so by pressing intellectually farther than other poets and finding no solution in it.

—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Theoretical Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)

hearing loss

Having attended too many slams, he was now deaf to the more nuanced forms of poetry.