high perch

Model for a line of poetry: First, imagine a high perch, and then arrange some songbirds along its length.

very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

speed bumps ahead

Not speed reading, reading poetry should impede the reader.

burst bubble

When the poetry bubble burst no one lost any money.

turn to poetry

Note to celebrities who turn to poetry: Leave it to the poets, those language toilers who will never have the least measure of your fame.

cliché tweaked

In some cases it makes sense not to cut the cliché but to twist it, to repurpose it, making its application more acceptable.

bright nothings

A litany of incandescent inanities.

pretend no one will see

She had recently turned seventy, which may have been weighing on her more than she thought. Many friends she would show her work to are dead, she'd noticed lately. “So it’s like, who cares? You have to have someone waiting for you.” And readers? “If I think about them, I can’t write anything. When I write a poem, I have to pretend no one will see it.”

I asked what emotion was most productive for her work—sadness? happiness? “Loneliness,” she answered quickly.

Her best writing comes when, she said, she is “in my nightgown for days, not thinking about anyone else. It takes a couple of days just thrashing through the brambles to get to any type of clearing, and it’s very painful. It’s frustrating, you see all your limitations, but a lot of what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you if you mean it. I like it once I settle in, but the borders are tough.” Once she passes into the other state, “that’s the best feeling in the world—we’re utterly ourselves and we’re nobody.”

Marie Howe being quoted in The Work of Art: how something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

not much

How much I love a poem made by the least means.

the way in

In poetry, surprise is often a matter of perspective.

not seen

Poet, strive for the scene unseen.

fail to fly

Poets feather themselves with their chapbooks and books, but few lift off.

my break

James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, the book that hooked me on poetry.

only sincerity

In brief, Manet was liberal and a humanitarian. He was a refined and cultivated man of the world, and it would be a mistake to think that his hunger for recognition (which was always bitterly disappointed) was a mere character trait. When presenting his personal exhibition in 1867, he wrote: “It is only sincerity that gives my work a character that could seem to be one of protest. In fact, the artist has tried only to express his impressions. He has no desire to overturn tradition or to create a new kind of painting. He has simply tried to be himself, and not someone else…”
[…]
From beginning to end, Manet’s life was really an impassioned affirmation of a single right—that of expressing a world of feelings that he had really experienced. The refined “dandy” who was full of irony and scepticism, and who loved the superficiality of life on the boulevards, became terribly serious when anyone mentioned his art. Manet’s attitude and the domineering way in which he expressed his ideas about painting needed to be justified by exceptional novelty and clarity of vision, and that he was justified is abundantly shown by the influence that his ideas have had on all art since his time. “Manet was the first,” Matisse wrote, “to work by reflexes and thus simplify the painter’s task…expressing only what affected his senses and feelings immediately.”

—Dario Durbe, Edouard Manet (Premier Book, Oldbourne Book Co. Ltd., 1963)

fill 'er up

It was one of those long texts meant for those who need something to fill the blank spaces of their lives.

out of place

I found one of his poems slumming in an obscure little magazine.

store of value

Poetry is a lot like Bitcoin: It’s worth a lot to those who value it, and not much to anyone else.

device and artifice

A poet who used more devices than MacGyver.

architecture without lines

Claude Monet on his Rouen Cathedral series…

When the British painter Wynford Dewhurst asked for an account of the Rouen pictures, Monet replied, ‘I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.’
[…]
‘I have wanted to do architecture without doing its features, without the lines.’

Quoted in Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Knopf, 2024)