7.31.2021

life elevated

Art is an experience that arouses us beyond what our day-to-day offers.

7.29.2021

ordinary uncommon

The writer's problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the other to give reality.

—Thomas Hardy, Notebooks (1881)

7.27.2021

library paradox

When I had fewer books I read more. Or maybe I read the books I had better.

7.26.2021

don't stay too long

The writer welcomed the interviewer into his office, but the guest chair offered turned out to be quite uncomfortable.

7.24.2021

pierced consciousness

The first line went in like a hypodermic needle, quick with a faint twinge.

7.23.2021

no mail

The epistolary poem was marked ‘Return to Sender’.

7.22.2021

literary lineage

A critic who could take any new poet and show the links to all her/his literary lineage.

7.20.2021

roots with dirt

These days
whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

    just to make clear
    where they come from.

—Charles Olson

[Quoted in Dale Smith's essay re "Slow Poetry."]

7.19.2021

go big or

Sorry, but if you’re not a romantic poet, in time people will pay less attention.

7.17.2021

fire-breather

A political poet whose mouth was like a flamethrower: He had the sympathetic audience leaning back in their seats to avoid being singed.

7.16.2021

tough slog

The experience of reading a long poem is enhanced merely by one’s sense of accomplishment.

7.15.2021

word wait

The poet had waited a long time to use that particular word in a poem.

7.13.2021

time running out

He kept waiting for that one great run of poems.

7.12.2021

describe then design

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.

—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford U. Press, 1977), by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein.

7.11.2021

real struggle

The imagination as nemesis.

7.10.2021

other utterance

First line: announce something other.

7.07.2021

beyond the book

Books often don’t go on, but certain poems do persist in the public consciousness.

7.06.2021

remains airborne

A poem that somehow remained airborne in the zeitgeist.

7.05.2021

unsteady reading

The lectern was wobbly…the poems read even shakier.

7.03.2021

one stroke

It is better to paint a good unfinished
picture than a poor completed
one. Many believe that a picture
is finished when they have
worked in as many details as possible.
—One stroke can be a completed
work of art.

—Edvard Munch, The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We are Flames which Pour Out of the Earth (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2005) edited and translated by J. Gill Holland

7.02.2021

rescued and restored

Found on an acknowledgments page: The poem “Title Here” was published in an ill-advised version, based on an editor’s suggestions, in Lit Magazine. The poem has been restored to its original state in this volume.

7.01.2021

the nothing that is

Nothing is what those without content write about.