fierce company

Poetry decides power, not politics
or wealth, not torment. Fierce company,
those ragged lines, spells of a magician
that become; over time, more curse than elixir.

—Dennis Barone, "Side-Straddle Hop," After Math (Cyber Wit, 2023)

radio left on

Most poems will be like a radio left on in a vacant room, a device talking into space.

consumerist cantos

It was a dollar-store Cantos, its references and allusions coming cheap and easy.

word bather

A poet who bathed in words, and words were nothing to him and everything all at once.

[Thinking of poet Peter Ganick.]

improvement by mistakes

If this poem had any typos they would be considered assets.

not words alone

Poetry
Forgive me for helping you understand
that you're not made of words alone.

—Rogue Dalton, "Poetic Art" (1974)

no ball of light

A poet who wrote attractive lines and phrases that never would cohere into the force of a poem.

says too much

Writing that suffers from the utter inability to understate.

missing person

There was plenty of personality in the poems, but little that was truly personal.

face it

My best poems are written in the furrows of my brow, in the wrinkled lines radiating from around my eyes.

human politics

He didn’t write political poems, rather he wrote human poems, and thereby their concerns were political.

inventing a new language

In a letter to Frank O’Hara (August 18, 1965), Robert Motherwell wrote a series of aphoristic statements regarding art, artists and art-making. The intent of these statements was to spur O’Hara to get started on the catalog essay for a Motherwell retrospective at MOMA which O’Hara was curating: “…when the deadline for his catalog essay arrived, O’Hara developed writer’s block. Motherwell, who had experienced many such an impasse in his painting and writing, sent O’Hara a battery of his random thoughts, written in a single morning, hoping that one of them might ignite a spark. Against the objection of the artist, who felt his thoughts had been written for private purposes, O’Hara published Motherwell’s letter in the exhibition catalog.” From The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford U. Press, 1992), edited by Stephanie Terenzio, and here is a selection of Robert Motherwell’s remarks from the letter:

Only painters and sculptors, among artists, can be exposed in toto in a few minutes—or seem to be.

The content has always to be expressed in modern terms: that is the basic premise. Joyce understood that perfectly.

The greater the precision of feeling, the more personal the work will be.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one’s feeling precisely.

What paintings can stand up against the physical presence of nature? Few, and often least of all those who have nature as the principal subject.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others! What a choice?

The drama of creativity is that one’s resources, no matter how unusual, are inadequate.

Irony, the greatest necessity of everyday life, does not work in pictures. (Neither does pathos.)

There is something princely about even the most democratic artists.

One does not have to “understand” wholly to feel pleasure.

If life was longer one could express more. Since it isn’t, stick to the essentials.

The beauty of another being’s presence.

Some children quit painting if they haven’t the proper color. Picasso says, you just use another color. Who’s right?

The supreme gift, after light, is scale.

What better way to spend one’s life than to have, as one’s primary task, the insistence on integrity of feeling? No wonder others are fascinated by artists.

Moments of joy make existence bearable: who ignores joy is immoral.

The material things of life are mere decorations. Enough space, light, and white walls make any environment workable.

The world cannot endure that artists’ money comes from so much pleasure.

The surrealist group used to demand a picture each year from its painters: the proceeds were used to support their poets. They recognized the social injustice in the fact that a great painting has more commodity value than a great poem and equalized the situation. No one objected.

To modify one’s art is to modify one’s character. An artist whose work develops represents character growth, either slow and steady, like a garden, or in leaps…

The problem is to seize the glimpse.

The ethic lies in not making the glimpse presentable.

If one paints on an enormous scale, one gets involved in all the problems of running a lumberyard.

The beauty of Europe is that sculpture is everywhere. The sculpture doesn’t have to be great to function perfectly in the landscape, humanizing it.

America is what the poor people of Europe invented, given means enough and time. Europeans therefore shouldn’t snub it.

The only thing that I bought in Greece (1965) was a scale-model of a Homeric ship.

From my writings, it would seem that I am more interested in poetry than painting, which of course is not at all true. It is that the poets have speculated much more in words about what “the modern” is.

The interest in language so dominant in modern art is not an interest in semantics per se: it is a continual interest in making language (whatever the medium) to fit our real feelings better, and even to be able to express true feelings that had never been capable of expression before.

I love Hopkins’s insistence on particularization.

Barnett Newman for years has said that when he reads my writings he learns what I have been reading, but when he wants to know what I am really concerned with at a given moment, he looks at my pictures. He’s right.

To have the discipline to shut up, and just paint the pictures!

subject matter self

One of those poets who wouldn’t have a subject if she couldn’t write about herself.

stanza thus

A good stanza from almost any poem could stand alone as a poem.

cow of the world

There are lines for which a poet will not be forgotten, nor forgiven.

[Thinking of Richard Wilbur's "We milk the cow of the world...", from "Epistemology"]

language resources

Considering whether there is a hierarchy of language resources one can deploy in writing poetry: I think there are greater and lesser resources and then there are ones that rise and fall by the fashion of the times, and some that better serve the subjective predilections of this or that poet.

depleted lines

Long poems that aren’t narratives deplete themselves line by line.

make it better

If poets were allowed to publish only 100 pages of poetry every ten years, one wonders if the overall art might be lifted by such a constraint.

formatting f/x

The formatting looked advanced though the text was rather conventional.

resist the lapse

The best older poets resist the lapse into writing mainly about mortality and death.