different kinds of poets

There are poets who make poems and poets who receive and record them.

situational awareness

A poet should have the observational skills of a Jason Bourne.

recalling past voices

A poem…has the power to remind poet and reader alike of things they have read and heard. Also—and this is partly why the subject is so complex—it has the power to remind them of things that they have not read and heard, but that have been read and heard by others whom they have read and heard.

Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:

            through infusion sweet
     Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
     I follow here the footing of thy feet.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.

—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)

all of a piece

He wrote the same poem in a thousand versions.

book before horse

Poets more concerned over publications than whether they’re read.

filled out the form

The worse kind of poem is one that wouldn’t exist except to fill out a form.

more is bore

Some poets write two or more poems of the same type or theme within one poem.

don't abide

Hard to abide poets who abide only one kind of poetry.

markson notes

Because Theodore Roosevelt’s son was enamored with the poetry of E.A. Robinson, then President Roosevelt arranged for Robinson, who was destitute at the time, a job at the New York Customs House. A sinecure that allowed Robinson the means and the time to compose his verses.

Knowing that T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, visitors looking for his childhood home are surprised to find only a parking lot where the row house had been on Locust Street: The Waste Land.

Franz Kafka finished his story “A Hunger Artist” while dying from starvation due to complications caused by laryngeal tuberculosis.

bang-bang

Poet, bang it out.

signal plus noise

From the standpoint of information theory, poetry may contain a good deal of ‘noise’ but in the case of poetry it’s not extraneous to the signal.

not point at all

The scientist [Robert Hooke] turns next to “a point commonly so called, that is, the mark of a full-stop, or period.” Whether printed or made with a pen, the tiny point, circle or dot of the period turns out to be disfigured, ragged, deformed. Under the lens, this microdot looks as though it’s been made with a burnt stick on an uneven floor.

—Brian Dillon, “What Pitiful Bungling Scribbles and Scrawls,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

metaphoric power

The metaphor draws its strength from ever more disparate elements being joined until the difference becomes too great and the power of the metaphor dissipates. Of course the tolerance for disparity depends on the particular reader.

inflated till it pops

His reviews were inflated blurbs, to the point that reading to the end of one you began to wince, sure it was about to burst in your face.

violent forgetting

I notice where a page has been torn out of my notebook and this feels like a violent forgetting.

limited love

They claim to love poetry but can’t name more than a handful of poems beyond their own.

markson notes

Of the many languages that arose among humankind over the centuries, most never developed a written form.

It’s been estimated that Sappho wrote about 10,000 lines of poetry, but only 600 lines or so remain, many just single words on papyri fragments. Whole scrolls of Sappho’s poetry were lost to the fire that destroyed the library at Alexandria in 48 BCE.

“View du Boulevard du Temple” (1838) by Louis Daguerre is thought to be the first photograph wherein a living person is present. A small dark figure on the street in the early morning appears to be getting his boots polished. The person doing the polishing is obscured by the blur of the motions he was making during the long exposure, and by his lower station in life.

counter productive

Your hype is not helping your art.

be oblique

The poetic line may run straight across the page and be oblique at the same time.