5.29.2022

yadda yadda yaddo

A writer who took pride in having done the full circuit of residencies and retreats.

5.28.2022

two not three

Terza rima: A sequence of interrupted couplets.

5.27.2022

coat-hook

The title was just a coat-hook, a thing to hang a poem on.

5.26.2022

content / style

Content of a high order needs little style.

5.24.2022

doing the same thing

I don’t dismiss a poet for being prolific, but I am suspect of rote output.

5.22.2022

wasted words

Poet, write through the necessary word-waste.

5.20.2022

comes with the territory

It’s rare to find a formal poem that doesn’t sound stilted in places.

5.19.2022

block off the chip

The book I ordered, a study of the fragment in literature, arrived today. Turns out it’s over four-hundred pages.

5.18.2022

blood to poem

Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.

—Yannis Ritsos, Monochords (Tavern Books, 2017), translated by Paul Merchant.

5.17.2022

no absolutes

There are no absolutes when it comes to language.

5.16.2022

around the corner

Poet, write a line that can look around
the corner.

5.15.2022

know how

Knowing things makes for better writing: connections multiply, metaphors arise easily.

5.13.2022

not part way

Don’t start this poem unless you mean to finish it.

5.12.2022

poor poet

Poor poet. (One who earns no income from poetry writing.)
Poor poet. (One who writes inferior poetry.)
Poor poet. (An expression of sympathy for one who struggles to write superior poems.)

5.11.2022

foreign language

A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn to read it. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden. There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.

—Guy Davenport, A Balthus Notebook (David Zwirner Books, n.d.)

5.09.2022

5.08.2022

important poetry

When one reads enough poems, one learns the important entry points to the universe.

5.07.2022

words with holes

All words have holes in them.

5.05.2022

sound subject

Sometimes the subject is the sound.

5.04.2022

learned and declaiming

It’s not hard these days to be known as an intellectual poet.

5.03.2022

first principle

The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.

—Gustave Eiffel

The first principle of poetic beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its effect.

5.02.2022

no outer limit

Language itself is perhaps the only limit on what poetry can be, and sometimes I’m not sure that even that boundary holds.

5.01.2022

poorer for it

Many who enter the trade come to think that poetry should be spelled “poorertry”