2.28.2018

poet unbound

The translator has more responsibility than the poet has.

2.27.2018

covering the waterfront

I know all of the poets except the ones I don’t know.

2.24.2018

first translation

Language is a translation of life and the world.

2.22.2018

uses of poetry

Sitting at a café table, I noticed a poetry book had been jammed under one leg to keep the table from wobbling.

2.21.2018

poetry god

It was said of him that no one knew more about poetry than he did.

2.20.2018

all art is sensual

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

—William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (New Directions, 1951)

2.19.2018

poem in brackets

The ideal reader would be able to “bracket” (as Husserl theorized) the poem, and thus experience it as a singular and pure phenomenon

2.18.2018

wholly new

He showed me his revision but I could detect no provenance from the prior poem.

2.17.2018

vantage point

Never stoop to slap the popular. Wave to it from above as it passes by.

2.15.2018

nearly invisible

She was so much an identity poet she managed to make herself anonymous.

2.10.2018

sacred spider

Mallarmé described himself as a “sacred spider,” the inventor of a “marvelous lacework,” The appearance of “On Toss of the Dice” thus colluded, in its lacy lack of transitions, with the Lumière brother’s cinématagraphe, which had burst upon the world late December 1895 and was barely up and running before Mallarmé began his optical oeuvre. Bravely conceived and fiercely written against the long tradition of verbal poetry, “One Toss of the Dice” marked a great shift in the direction of the visuality of our own era, with still and moving projections, hand-held personal data devices, monitors, and screens.

—R. Howard Bloch, One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017)

2.08.2018

walt and emily

Whitman the empathetic ego at large. Dickinson the introspective ego writ large.

2.07.2018

abc and abs

A young poet was invited into the basement of an older poet, and upon seeing a letterpress there, asked what kind of exercise equipment it was.

2.05.2018

source images

An image that draws upon a history of related images.

2.03.2018

aged out

If an artist lives past about age 80, the assumption is that s/he is already dead. Which is to say that the creative life is assumed dead even if the artist isn’t.

2.01.2018

not accustomed

When Parra’s lines seem disconnected, it is because they are connected in a supralogical way in which we are not accustomed to seeing things. When the conventions of cause-and-result seem to be outraged, they are.

—Miller Williams, introduction to Emergency Poems (New Directions, 1972) by Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams