energy to inertia

The energy of the poem came from line to line being non sequitur. After about a dozen such lines the effect became inertial.

terrible cumulative force

The well-known critic, poet, and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, in an essay included as part of [Walker] Evans’s American Photographs, the catalogue for the artist’s landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, indicated how his friend’s gift as a photographer was that he could single out the specific, the particular, so as to suggest a shared, but often otherwise unrecognized commonality. “The power of Evans’s work,” Kirstein wrote, “lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” If Evans could lay bare the truth in one person, he could point it out in, and consequently for, everyone.

—Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity (Viking – Penguin Random House, 2023)

one or many

Many series poems are little more than extended writing exercises. One or two poems could count for the many.

many lives

Poet, your personal history is just an iteration of millions of others.

read local hear local

Read poetry locally. Hear poetry locally.

do one thing well

Writers and artists who get stuck in a signature style.

poetry wants you

Poetry opens its arms to people society has trouble accepting.

extrusion publishing

No respect for a press that doesn’t protect its list.

world falls silent

No one really likes starlings.
For that reason alone, I continue
to savor them as they dip and dim
and vanish, taking with them
stemma, chrysalis, reticulate, telluric,
umbra, redolence, circumjacence,
and the verb perpend—each one
endangered, nearly extinct, desperate
for a mouth to roost in, for a tongue
that will relish the taste of its consonants
and vowels. What else might a word want?
A mind that respects what words mean.
Enough heart to know that within each
word left unsaid, a lost autochthonous
world falls silent. No assonance,
not even an echo. Each unused word an urn.

—Margaret Gibson, closing of the poem “Elegy, with Murmuration of Starlings,” Connecticut River Review, 2024

special case

Poetry is a special case of prose.

smug garde

He was part of the self-satisfied avant-garde.

i think therefore iamb

He was beginning to think in iambs or else he was starting to hear his pulse inside his head.

makes itself new

Unless the world stands still, poetry will change.

weak critic

A critic who only took on books by no-accounts so as not to offend any of the gatekeepers.

composition or content

There are people who keep commonplace books for their compositional and calligraphic beauty. Other people will scrawl over the pages or paste in clippings askew, concerned only with the quality of the content they’ve captured.

discursive control

He was a master of the meander poem.

no tail no donkey

…one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write—a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems—people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets—it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

—Randall Jarrell, from the brief essay “Bad Poets” (1953)

faux poems

Poet, if you don’t have anything to say—that’s okay. Just wait. Don’t fall for the faux poems that come from prompts.

bigger than us

Poetry is bigger than you or me and any of our predilections.

bad day for poets

It has been estimated that if Brooklyn suddenly slid into the Atlantic, the U.S. would lose 50% of its poets in a single catastrophic event.

young and beautiful

All the poets are getting younger and more beautiful.

mere description

I have always thought it was worth paying attention to actions or qualities routinely dismissed as mere when they appear in writing about art, literature, the world. Mere description, for instance, is in reality the most vexing thing to attempt when faced with any form of art, let alone aspect of reality.

—Brian Dillon, “Essay on Affinity II,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

only one-hundred

These days if you are familiar with the work of one-hundred contemporary poets you’re just getting started.