page count: one

A broadside equal to a whole book.

chance meeting

Always a pleasure to encounter a secret lover of poetry.

limited but unlimited

Another point made by the Institutionalists is that poetry should try to produce its effect by suggestion rather than direct statement or description. Yen Yü said that ‘poetry that does not concern itself with principles nor falls into the trammel of words is the best’, and that great poetry ‘has limited words but unlimited meaning’. It follows that the poet should not heap up too many realistic details but attempt to capture the spirit of things with a few quick strokes of the brush.

—James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966)

learning to read

It wasn’t that poem by poem the book got better, rather poem by poem you read them better.

taken aback

After reading her poem in the workshop group she could hear a scuffing sound as chairs pushed back a little ways from the table.

lesser line

For years you had a line of poetry running through your mind that was, you discovered, misremembered; now the actual line seems off and less well rendered.

critique carry forward

The critique of this poem may not matter; however, that critique may inform the next poem.

didn't see that coming

Tabula rasa, facing the blank page, then ex nihilo, the wonder of the poem that comes from nowhere you saw coming.

world deprived of metaphors

The unhappy consciousness must find a way out of this tension between Hegel’s rational (and reasonable) knowledge and Job’s total refusal to accept it. Poetry, Fondane believed, was perhaps the only option left and his reasoning can be summarized as follows: There was a time when there was no split in the human consciousness between the world in which one lived and acted and this other, parallel world created by the mind in its act of reflection upon the external world. At that time human thinking was a thinking of participation. As the rational, Socratic thinking (i.e., philosophy in the traditional sense) was born and began to evolve, this thinking of participation, existential thinking (not existentialist) began to retreat and diminish. But at the point of intersection of the two, thinking of participation and philosophical reflection, poetry came into being. Poetry is, thus, the refuge of the unhappy consciousness, the refuge offered to a being engaged in the confrontation with an all-pervading and domineering rationality. But poetry cannot be practiced in a world in which the literal dominates; a world in which there is a perfect match between the signified and the signifier, a world deprived of metaphors. Unfortunately, Fondane did not have the opportunity to explore further and develop this so promising idea.

—Michael Finkenthal, Benjamin Fondane: A poet-philosopher caught between the Sunday of History and the Existential Monday (Peter Lang, 2013), 59-60.

book once owned by

Inside the cover of this book I see written the previous owner’s name, “Brett Holt.” Brett, perhaps you are dead, that would be an excuse; or you were forced by circumstance to travel light, to get rid of most of your possessions, that would be a good enough reason, otherwise I don’t know how it was you ever parted with this book.

all or nothing

Even the experts couldn’t excerpt from his work.

first flowering

No flower is so beautiful as a poet holding and reading from a first book.

known unknown

One of those poems many readers knew about but the anthologies had yet to acknowledge.

genre fluid

The work was ‘transgenre’.

in my head

The intensity and thoroughness of his formal training, coupled with years of self-schooling, enabled him to separate the process of painting into stages: a generative, conceptual phase and an executive, process-oriented one. In the first he conceived the complete work almost in its entirety, much as an experienced chess player plans a number of strategies before making a move. In the second he would paint an entire canvas quickly, so that it retained the freshness of a wonderful accident. When asked, “How can you paint a big picture so quickly?” he replied, “because I’ve already painted it in my head…Just putting it on the canvas, that’s nothing."

“Milton Avery: The Late Paintings” by Robert Hobbs, Milton Avery: The Late Paintings (Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

desperate act

Revision often feels like shooting one’s horse.

from a car window

Drive-by imagery.

come knocking

Reading the long poem, I thought to myself, Where is that man on business from Porlock when you need him to come knocking?

against self rule

Resist the tyranny of personal narrative.

this one, this one is it

Editors roll their eyes at those perpetual revisers. The author who sends him/her a dozen drafts of a single poem or story, each one supposedly a great improvement over the prior draft. As the galleys are being typeset, one more revision arrives, so clearly better than all that came before.