knows more

The poet knows more about the poem than the poem shows.

don't go there

Poet, don’t dare to call the clouds flocculent.

content and container

Weigh and measure your content, then find or mold the container.

make it move

New or not, it must move me.

small change

He was a poet and so he could always dig into his pockets for a few more words.

floor to ceiling

The beauty of a good bookshop filled floor to ceiling with loaded shelves, or any well-stocked library for that matter, is that you feel here is a place equal to the mind, housing and holding the known and making available the unknown of this world.

stutter on

But every poem is no more than a stutter
beneath the endless stutter of the stars.

—Roberto Juarroz, Vertical Poetry: Last Poems (White Pine Press, 2011), translation by Mary Crow

nothing but

A nothing poem made of nothing but words.

bridge too far

He wanted to review poetry books but couldn’t imagine reading a bad one to the last line.

writer reader reviewer

It’s easier to write poetry than to be a reader, and harder yet to be a reviewer.

first stroke

First line: first brushstroke on a blank canvas.

fly in the web

I can draw a web of connections around any poem.

rhythm of my imagination

At that time, I knew only that free verse was ill-suited to my spirit….But I lacked faith in traditional meters….And besides I had parodied them too often to take them seriously now….I knew of course that traditional meters don’t exist in any absolute sense, but are remade according to the interior rhythms of each poet’s imagination. And one day, I found myself muttering a certain jumble of words (which turned into a pair of lines from “South Seas”) in a pronounced cadence that I had used for emphasis ever since I was a child, when I would murmur over and over the phrases that obsessed me most in the novels I was reading. That’s how, without know it, I found my verse, which was of course for “South Seas” and several other poems as well, wholly instinctive….Gradually I discovered the intrinsic laws of this meter…, but I was always careful not to let it tyrannize me and was ready to accept, when it seemed necessary, other stress patterns and line lengths. But I never again strayed far from my scheme, which I consider the rhythm of my imagination.

—Cesare Pavese, from Pavese’s essay “The Poet’s Craft,” quoted by Geoffrey Brock in the introduction to his translations of Cesare Pavese in Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon, 2002)

not me

If a poem writes itself, do I have a plausible alibi?

go slow

Reading poetry is slow reading.

demotic speech

If poetry had not turned to demotic speech after Modernism, after Beat, after New American Poetry, etc., it would have become like a collection of antique music boxes that are only wound from time to time to keep the springs in good working order.

talk it up

Blurbs and other forms of rodomontade...

"No industry [film industry] did more to destroy the meaning of words. The follies are too familiar to need laboring here—how the story of a couple of cowboys quarreling over a girl became an epic, the tale of a small-time 'hoofer' a deathless saga. Colossal, terrific, stupendous—these words became the small change of film advertising. A reservation was put on a whole series of other adjectives like throbbing, rending, tingling, pulsating, pounding, sizzling, scorching, stark, elemental, volcanic, and searing. No story was ever taken from life—it was ripped or torn from the mighty canvas of humanity."

—E.S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising! (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1953)

bad poet good person

When you are the organizer of a reading series, inevitably someone who is a terrible poet but a very nice person will ask to be a featured reader (often touting a self-published book)—and there is no good way of saying no.

runover words

He had a funny habit of placing a line break so that the words starting the next line would be shown to be superfluous.

loose thread

Like a loose thread in a beautiful garment, an odd unwound line can alter and awaken one’s reading of the poem.

repeated beat-down

Any poem that uses the same repeated word or phrase past a page’s length is trying to shut down the reader’s mind.