words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

essential experience

Imagination fails the further it gets from experience.

early risers

The dawn is a term for the early morning used by poets and other people who don’t have to get up.

—Oliver Herford

flash to ash

The poem composed in a flash, and any revision would leave only ash.

dead dead

He went back to revise the poem not realizing rigor mortis had set in.

from other tongues

Often it’s non-native speakers who write the most beautiful English sentences.

root cellar

You haven’t gone down to basement of this poem. There's a root cellar with a door hanging by one hinge waiting to be pushed open.

worth the effort

Spend the time revising this poem, or just spin up a new one.

gifting library

Don’t ask me how many books I own—ask how many I’ve read and passed on.

poet praising poet

I love a good homage poem—a poet praising another poet—knowing how hard it is to write even a few poems that make themselves known and at the same time matter.

other voice

I am asserting that poetry is irreducible to ideas and system. It is the other voice. Not the word of history or of antihistory but the voice that, in history, always says something else—the same something since the beginning. I don’t know how to define this voice or explain what it is that constitutes this difference, this tone which, though it doesn’t set it altogether apart, makes it unique and distinct. I will say only that it is strangeness and familiarity in person. We need only hear it to recognize it.

—Octavio Paz, “Latin-American Poetry,” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987)

stands aside

The poet stands aside: Someone standing in the shadow of the doorway, waiting for hours for who knows what.

light fare

He’d tasted some of this, some of that,
but he never made a meal of one book,
nor had he ever feasted for days
at the banquet of an author’s oeuvre.

is quantum

All translation is quantum.

reel off

When you realize you can really write, I mean you can reel off line after line effortlessly, that’s when you need to set some limits.

more than speech

When reading your poetry consider: enunciation, pace, pauses (silence), tone and modulation. Some poets aren’t blessed with pleasing voices, but they can thoughtfully manage their speech patterns to better present their poetry.

inspired reader

A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized—or at least everyone recognizes his own poet—by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.

—Paul Valéry, “Poetry of Abstract Thought” (1939), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 (Wesleyan U. Press, 2004), edited by Melissa Kwasny

empty basket

Each time I passed the poet busking in the square he seemed to be getting thinner.

detail minded to death

A writer is someone who even fusses over the font style of his gravestone.

workshop is

Workshop: Eight to ten people talking about a poem none of them could’ve written.

kinds of containers

A poem to me is a container whether it be benign like a water pitcher or dangerous like a pipe bomb.

theme and form

I always have two things in my head—I always have a theme and the form. The form looks for the theme, the theme looks for the form, and when they come together you’re able to write.

—W.H. Auden, “Obiter Dicta,” W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 1995) by Charles Osborne

in place of a poem

The mountain of text that took the place of a poem.

[A wry riff on Stevens]

no homilies here

There is no place for homilies in poetry.

slow release

A poem as a slow-release potion.

from mouth to immortality

A poem finds itself most alive in the mouth, but for immortality it must find a place where it’s written down.

preparing to write

Unless you’re brooding, muttering under your breath, pacing away from your desk, then you are probably not ready to write.

two halves

Half of the published poems are a half too long.

abrupt edge

The abrupt edge is actually an ornithological term that I have turned into a metaphor . . . It’s that area of greatest interest and intensity— for birds, of course, but I think also as a metaphor— between the dangerous open space and the bower or covered safe place, let’s say the woods as opposed to an open field—where the danger is, where anything can happen. If [ I ] can find a sense of the experience where there is both danger and safety—and maybe the safety part is the form— then I think I’ve got it right. The danger, of course, would be in the content.

—Stanley Plumly, A Conversation with Maryland Poet Laureate Stanley Plumly by Kathleen Hellen, The Baltimore Review.

get close

You can’t read a poem nor write a poem, unless you can close read a poem.

crack of the lash

Poet, crack that first line like a lash.

driven home

The throughline of the poem ended with a last line that was a stake in the ground.

the subject is

 The poem is the subject of the poem.

not that kind of light

 The flaw of thinking that language could ever illuminate one’s life.

better fit

Many poets don’t realize their poems would be a better fit as prose.

same same

One felt the poet could go on endlessly in the same register and tone of voice.

be rid of it

Borges likes to say that he is lazy.

“If some notion comes into my head, and now and then it does, let’s say a notion about a story or about a poem, I do my best to discourage it. But if it keeps on worrying me then I let it have its way with me and I try to write it down in order to be rid of it.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Words and Their Masters (Doubleday, 1974) p41

shut up

Closing the book a few pages in is the reader’s way of shutting up the author.

mood matters

Remember that your mood will determine how you read or hear a poem.

to have no words

There are many ways to praise a poem, including being struck speechless.

critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

talk talk

Try not to talk your way out of a poem. It’s going to take too long.

whisper or gurgle

Isaiah 29:4. “And thou shalt be brought down, and speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.” This describes true poetry. Language suffering the condition of its utterance. Like Pier delle Vigna in Dante, “si della scheggia rotta usciva insieme / parole e sangue, che io lasciai la cima / cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme” (So from the broken twig spewed out words and blood, so that I let the branch fall, and stood like a man in fear). All spitting and hissing, primal language of pain, original language. Language is a physical medium, needs blood or dust to come true. Poetry must whisper or gurgle.

—Rosanna Warren, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets (Norton, 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss. [297]

writer killer

Those dour author photos that look like assassins.

its own little word

Everything around us is a sub-culture, including poetry.

almost a sentence

The closer a line of poetry is to a sentence, the more power it has.

summarized

The poem’s title was a synopsis of the poem.

dissolving lines

A poem that was dissolving in the mind even before you reached the last line.

looking out

I’m more interested in poetry that looks out and around and not poetry that looks primarily within.

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

what wells up

Too often writing a poem on a whim rather than waiting for the utterance to well up from within.

woolgathering

Poet, don’t worry over your woolgathering ways—that’s how poems get made.

do no harm

All poetry workshops should adopt the Hippocratic motto: "to help, or at least, to do no harm," shortened in Latin as, primum non nocere, ‘first, do no harm’.

welcoming all that follow

Being the first genre, poetry embraces all other genres.

game player

A parlor-game kind of poetry.

it works that way

It wasn’t the poem I meant to write, but it was the poem I did write.

trunk of a tree

When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained,
Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.
Indeed, feeling and expression should never fail to correspond,
As each emotional change wears a new complexion on a sensitive face.
Thought that swells with joy bursts into laughter;
When grief is spoken, words reverberate with endless sighs;
No matter if the work be accomplished in one flash on the page,
Or is the result of the most deliberate brush.

—Lu Chi (261- 303), “The Working Process,” Essay on Literature (translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen), Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century (Grove Press, 1965), edited by Cyril Birch. [This essay was written in rhymed-prose and was composed three years before Lu Chi was executed during a power struggle of the Chin court.]

jail break

Poet, make a genre jail break.

anything goes

In poetry anything is permitted, which both holds it open to discovery and stirs it into chaos.

inner workings

As with wrist watches, some poems show their mechanisms while the workings of others are covered.

lost art

Losing one’s art while striving to be recognized as an artist: Making all the right self-promotional and professional moves, but not attending to the soul-work.

hats and coats

There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

—Isaac D’Israeli, in the essay “Literary Fashions,” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3). Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield

aphotic zone

A poem gradually settling to the bottom of one’s drafts file.

mistaken evaluation

It’s impossible for most poets to recognize that they’ve written something of little worth.

thoughtful poem

One of those I-think-this-I-think-that poems.

alive like that

Model for a poem: A late summer field full of weeds and wildflowers, visited by butterflies and birds.

is island

A poem is a language island.

perceptible disappearnances

It is poetry that remarks on the barely perceptible disappearances from our world such as that of the sleeping porch or the root cellar. And poetry that notes the barely perceptible appearances.

[…]

Poets should exceed themselves—when demands on us are slack, we should be anything but. Pressing the demands of the word forward is not only relevant but urgent. If our country does not vigorously cultivate poetry, it is either poetry’s ineluctable time to wither or time to make a promise on its own behalf to put out new shoots and insist on a much bigger pot.

—C.D. Wright, from “Collaborating,” The Essential C.D. Wright (Cooper Canyon, 2025), edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers, 119-120

me and me again

Another self-documentarian poet.

poetic power

There are poets who contained their powers, and poets who were overwhelmed by them.

face forward

A poet who wore the language mask.

he was like that

A poet who broke the rules over his knees and then chewed them with his teeth.

ends here

It’s okay to stomp on a poem to make it stop.

lonely pleasure

Often have I sighed to measure
By myself a lonely pleasure,
Sighed to think I read a book
Only read, perhaps, by me.

—William Wordsworth, “To the Small Celandine (Common Pilewort); To the Same Flower,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, p.338

then you're in it

Best if the scene is being set without the least sound of the backdrop coming down.

afterimages

One measurement of a poem is how much memory residue it leaves behind.

word well

For a poet, each word is a well: dark, deep, full of echoes, and the faint reflection of water.

algebraic lyric

The lyric poem as an expression, an equation or an inequation (borrowing terms from algebra). As an expression, the lyric poem is a gesture, a stance, an outcry, without any particular shape or resolution. As an equation, the lyric becomes fully formed, taking shape and resolving itself. As inequation, the lyric grasps about but finds no shape or resolution in its utterance.

self-reported

As poets and artists we tend to self-report our successes and breakthroughs.

always be closing

At poetry readings, I’ve seen poets who can’t even sell a few copies after having read from their book(s). This should be a cause for concern. You should be able to close the deal in the room.

quill of smoke

           The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.

—Norman MacCaig, from "July Evening," The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon, 2011), edited by Ewen MacCaig

for the few

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contra beckett

Fail better? No, poet, fail more beautifully.

curse of verse

Formal poems that put perfection of form above poetic essence, fail as poems.

offer and payoff

The sonnet works by offering a promise (or hook) in the first 8 to 10 lines, and then immediately giving the reader the payoff.

fool's golden age

Now matter the glow, it’s always an iron pyrite age.

too beautiful to understand

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

—Carl Sandburg, from the poem "Manitoba Childe Roland"

splutter poem

So much going on verbally, you’re gonna need a bib to read this poem aloud.

write your own

You realize you haven’t lived the life to write that poem, but that’s no reason not to write your own.

[after reading a Jack Gilbert poem]

a long list

Make a list of all the antisemite artists and writers. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

[David Markson in one of his 'non-novels' called out very many artists and writers for their antisemitism.]

only a footnote

He wrote the kind of poetry that would never accrete any lasting acclaim but might hang on for a time as a footnote.

beach reads

There are poetry books too that make for good beach reading.

same times

The feet at which I have before or after sat include those of Heidegger, Coué, Bertrand Russell, Charles Péguy, C.S. Lewis, Whately Carrington, Charles Williams, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, Kenneth Burke, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Fr. [Martin Cyril] D’Arcy, Professor [Herbert] Butterfield, Gerald Heard, J.B. Priestley, J.-P. Sartre and others too numinous to mention at random. Few men can know more than I have been told about the Contemporary Crisis, the Modern Malaise, the Present Predicament, or the Dilemma of Today. None of these things (sometimes I suspect they may all be one) seems to differ radically from the problems with which, say, Ecclesiasticus, Montaigne or Leopardi was confronted.

—Daniel George, Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954)

to the brim

Think of the last line as a brim not to breach. Or a brim that overflows only in the reader's mind.

uneasy at rest

A poem is uneasy even at rest.

abandonment issues

Make a list of all the artists who abandoned their spouses and children. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

final lines

Poet, write the poem as though it will be your last.

much worse than that

A poem that had to get much worse before it could be made any better.

distillate

The poem as distilled prose.

chaotic reader

This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
[...]
There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry—but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything,” A Defense of Ardor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

revision of a kind

In making erasure/blackout poems, poets seldom turn to their own texts, but perhaps they should.

impossible to answer

Can the emotion I need to express be found in language alone?

published poet

It’s possible to publish a great deal of poetry without being a poet.

really funny

Poet, don’t be a wannabe comedian.

tested by the times

So many canonical poems that would be cut down in a workshop these days.

hard work with words

If the novelist seeks the mot propre, how much more so the poet. His words are isolated, arranged in a metrical pattern, where not only the value, or values, of each single word must be considered, but also the close interdependence of one upon the other: for every word is quick to take colour from its companion, and will gain or lose in emphasis according to its position in the line. The adjustment is very delicate, the labour painful. A lyric by Wordsworth dances gaily enough: yet that stolid figure would first pace for many days up and down the back garden, "humming and booing about", and scattering scraps of paper as he went.

—George H W Rylands, Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928)

weighed down

Poet, let the words weigh heavy.

speak your truth

Confessionalism at its best is speaking your truth.

old new borrowed blue

For a wedding they say it’s good luck for the bride to wear ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. This could be the model for a good poetry reading: Read something old, read something new, read something borrowed (the generous act of reading another poet’s poem), and the blue will be evident in the reading because it’s poetry.

telling cover

There was a time in poetry publishing when you couldn’t just judge a book by its cover. Now it’s okay—no need to break open the book to read a poem or two before passing judgement.

obviously magnificent

You can’t explain the poem: you can’t say what it’s about, you can’t even make a claim for it as a poem, yet it manifests itself in the space of the page and declares itself magnificent.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

pulled out stops

A poem unimpeded by punctuation.

[Thinking of W.S. Merwin]

style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

one and many

A poem should not be overly varied but poetry should be various in order not to bore us.

poem as brick

A poem made from mutable clay of human existence but solid as brick.

hard to read

Your layout didn’t improve the poem but it was successful in making it harder to read.

what they don't say

Gamblers don’t talk about their losses and poets don’t talk about their rejections.

to declare or to disclose

Too many poems declare themselves outright when a slow disclosure would be more effective.

living things

Another poetic requirement, necessary to emphasize since reading and writing became almost universal throughout the English-speaking area fifty years ago, is that every word must be given its full meaning. In commercial, scientific, and newspaper prose there is an increasing tendency to use words as mere counters, stripping them of their history and force and associations—as one might use a box of old foreign coins in a card game without regard for their date, country, face-value or intrinsic value. The creative side of poetry consists of treating words as if they were living things—in coupling them and making them breed new life.

—Robert Graves, “Preface to a Reading of Poems,” Food for the Centaurs (Doubleday, 1960)

person or the poetry

It’s the editor’s dilemma: The feeling that you’re not judging the poetry but the poet’s life.

prose poem test

The prose poem is the true test of a poem: Could the piece be unlineated and still be a good poem.

mind to paper

One of those poems of the mind that evaporates on paper.

my life

So many poets who think their life stories are important.

locates in space

Like a bat, the poem echolocates in space.

capitalism's mouthpiece

A post-mo poem that capitulates to capitalism at every turn with a product placement or brand name.

poet's grave

[Scene takes place at a ruined monastery that has been turned into a prison camp]

     From all others, Yakov Petrovich Polonsky chose this place as his own and gave instructions that he was to be buried here. Man, it seems, has always been prone to the belief that his spirit will hover over his grave and gaze down on the peaceful countryside around it.
     But the domed churches have gone; the half of the stone walls that is left has been made up in height by a plank fence with barbed wire, and the whole of this ancient place is dominated by those sickeningly familiar monsters: watchtowers. There is a guardhouse in the monastery gateway, and a poster that says, “Peace among Nations,” with a Russian workman holding a little black girl in his arms.
[…, speaking to the warder]
     “Tell me—according to the map, there’s a poet called Polonsky buried here. Where is his grave?”
     “You can’t see Polonsky. He’s inside the perimeter.”
     So Polonsky was out of bounds. What else was there to see? A crumbling ruin? Wait, though—the warder was turning to his wife: “Didn’t they dig Polonsky up?”
     “Mm. Took him to Ryazan.” The woman nodded from the porch as she cracked sunflower seeds with her teeth.
     The warder thought this was a great joke: “Seems he’d done his time—so they let him out . . .”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Ashes of a Poet,” Stories and Prose Poems (FSG, 1971), translated by Michael Glenny, p. 249

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

subject suspect

Subject matter matters more than most poets allow.

off message

Unlike politicians, poets never stay on message.

burst of history

Poems burst forth with their history.

signs and wonders

Mostly a poem is signs and wonders.

language preceding language

One of [Dada’s] founders, the German poet Hugo Ball tells how, on June 23, 1916, in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, hiding his face behind a mask by Hans Arp, he recited, to the astonishment, indignation, and fascination of the audience, a phonetic poem consisting entirely of nonsense syllables and meaningless words. Ball’s experience, as he himself recounts it, lucidly and with feeling bordering on religious trance; it was a regression to the magic spell, or more precisely, to a language preceding language: “With those poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism. We returned to the profound alchemy of the Word, beyond words, thus preserving poetry within its last sacred domain.”

—Octavio Paz, "Reading and Contemplation," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

sounds found a way

The sounds found a way to move the poem forward.

winged lines

If a writer is to avoid oblivion and to live on, it will be on the wings of quote marks.

no sleep

The poet will not let you sleep.

mad meantime

In a perfect world no political poetry would be written. In the mad meantime, we must ‘write’ the wrongs.

attention to the overlooked

It was said of her that she paid attention to the overlooked things.

not really imperfect

…Japanese poets and painters might say with Yves Bonnefoy: imperfection is the acme of achievement. The imperfection, as has been noted, is not really imperfect: it is a voluntary act of leaving unfinished. Its true name is awareness of the fragility and precariousness of existence, an awareness of that which knows itself to be suspended between one abyss and another. Japanese art, in its most tense and transparent moments, reveals to us those instants—because each is only that, an instant—of perfect equilibrium between life and death. Vivacity: mortality.

—Octavio Paz, "The Tradition of the Haiku," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

faster round and round

The poem was a whirlpool of circumlocution.

first river to cross

Your first line should be your Rubicon.

wild encounter

I’ll pay attention when I’m startled by a poem of yours that I've encountered in the wild.

slow to disclose

A poem should not immediately disclose itself as a poem.

rounded-upon-itself

What sort of a poet can this be, who is ‘traditional’ and ‘yet has no poetic forerunners’? We solve this riddle by saying that in his techniques Mandelstam was indeed unprecedented, yet the techniques were made to serve a form—why not say simply, a beauty?—that rejoiced in calling upon every precedent one might think of, from Homer to Ovid, to the builders of Santa Sophia, to Dante and Ariosto and Racine. For it is true, surely: the sort of form to which Mandelstam vows himself alike in nature and in art, the form of the bent-in and the rounded-upon-itself, is the most ancient and constant of all European understandings of the beautiful—it is what long ago recognised in the circle the image of perfection.

—Donald Davie, foreword to Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Press, 1989), translated by James Greene

first poet

The moon was the earth’s first poet.

no library card

He would go to the library to write and to read books, but he wouldn’t check any of them out—wouldn’t take them home—where he had too many books to read in one lifetime.

too fast to last

Haste is the enemy of important art.

filmic language

The poem as film made language.

is foundation

When you reach the last line you should feel it as foundation for the whole poem.

questions without answers

I have sat through many Q & A’s after poetry readings and have always been bored. I am against Q & A’s; I believe the poetry audience should be allowed to sit with the feelings and imaginings evoked by the poetry itself, should go home with them, and let them nourish their dream life.

—Doug Anderson, essay “In Praise of Aporia,” published in Plume #164 April 2025 plumepoetry.com

forgive them

Forgive them, for they know not what they write.

poem eater

An image can eat a whole poem.

taught right

Been lucky not to have been taught by teachers without their own ideas.

rope-ladder

To read a good poem is like climbing down a rope-ladder, line by line never sure there is another length below you that can hold you, and not sure it reaches all the way to the ground.

two kinds of reaching

Here are…two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes–with strength of expression and skill and luck–reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.

—Muriel Rukeyser, from her Preface to The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw-Hill, 1978)

siblings

Force and form are close kin.

literary landfill

Writers are unable or unwilling to dispose of large batches of their work. Instead they persist in publishing anything and everything they can, thus they create the conditions that cause even their best pieces to be covered up in the sheer volume of work out in the world. It’s not easy to spot a gold watch in a landfill.

not mine anymore

Be justly proud of the poem you discarded.

poor prayers

We bring our poems, paltry offerings at the altar of language, in hope that some part of the immense mystery is revealed.

good counsel

The reviewer stated, “No excerpt from this book could do it justice.” This is like the defense lawyer who, being worried about self-incrimination, doesn’t want her/his defendant to take the stand.

dubious book promotion

Here’s some notable marketing copy by Wave Books:

"...Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow."

Makes you want to buy the book, doesn't it?

markson notes

Ferdinand Magellan is credited with first circumnavigating the earth. It's not well known that his ship returned to Spain without him. Magellan died about two-thirds through the voyage, far from returning to his starting point in Spain, having been killed in fighting on an island called Cebu.

Directing the filming of Spartacus (1960), Stanley Kubrick dismissed his cinematographer Russell Metty and took over shooting himself. By contract Kubrick wasn’t able to erase Metty’s name from the credits. Spartacus didn’t win an Oscar for best picture, nor did Kubrick get the award for best director. Metty, however, won the Oscar for best cinematography.

Thomas Hardy’s wife wrote to a friend of theirs: “Tom’s in a very good mood today. He’s just written the most melancholy poem!”

all about me

A poet who had memorized many poems, all his.

be the prey

Better are poems that sneak up on you, and not the ones you must hunt.

poor po

To tweak a line from the Gospels, "The poor po will always be with us."

lives of the young poets

Politics was not our sole passion. We were even more attracted by literature, the arts, and philosophy. For me and for a few of my friends, poetry turned, if not into a public religion, at least into an esoteric cult wavering between the catacombs and the conspirators’ basement. I found no contradiction between poetry and revolution: they were two facets of the same movement, two wings of the same passion. This belief would link me later to the surrealists. The plural avidity: life and books, street and cell, bars and loneliness in crowds in cinemas.

—Octavio Paz, Itinerary (Harcourt, 1999), translated by Jason Wilson [33]

hard on the head

It certainly wasn’t concrete poetry…but it was obdurate to human understanding.

still talking

No matter how it started, no matter where it went, he could talk his way out of any poem.

wading into the waves

I know it's bad form when litmags don’t respond in a timely fashion. And there are egregious cases of litmags holding work for a year or more only to reject it. On the other side, I think of the first editor of Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray, and what he described as the 'undertow of words'. I’m not without some sympathy for those readers/screeners and editors wading into the waves of submissions.

this way always then that

The education of a poet is continuous and divergent.

all beat

You got the meter right but pity there was no poetry to pin to it.

lives of the poets

I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kuo P’o, long
dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and
after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
-
I thought of Tsu Yung who, at his examination, wrote a
a poem of only four lines. Questioned by the examiner, he
replied: “That was all I had to say.”

—Eliot Weinberger, The Life of Tu Fu (New Directions, 2024)

[More excerpts over at Tramp Freighter.]

less than

A cento is always less than the sum of its parts.

stop short

Look for that preemptive ending that undercuts any temptation toward a grand concluding flourish.

all about me

Her poems were language selfies.

whip hand

Some just ride the poem; some hold the whip and will use it.

blank block

[This page unintentionally left blank.]

general glut

When submitting work ask if you’re contributing to a general literary glut.

no better or worse

A poem that could be endlessly revised and be no better for it.

slack line

Each week Muriel gave us writing as well as reading assignments, and we would go over class poems as well as poems by Whitman, Keats, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams. Once when someone read a poem that had a very weak line, a line without much in it, Muriel called the line "slack," and we could see the line sagging there in the poem, without tension, nothing that an acrobat would trust her life to.

Then she said, “No one wants to read poetry. No one wants to!” (With her good-humored energetic pessimism that felt like optimism). “You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down, impossible for them to stop reading it—word after word you have to keep them from closing the book. They want to close the book. And if it’s slack they’ll be able to—nothing says they have to read to the end. No one’s making them. And they don’t want to! They could be doing something else, like making a cheese sandwich! You have to make them want to go on reading with every word and every line.”

And Muriel said this cheerfully, the truth of it giving her voice energy. There was no whining in her about the place of poetry in America. It was just a reality, what was there for us to work with.

—Sharon Olds, “A Student’s Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2020)

worse before it gets better

You could make this poem better by making it worse.

slippery poetry

Any poetry you can name, I can describe an opposite kind.

standard mistake

It’s common to mistake one’s taste for a standard.

face it

When it comes to poetry. all genre considerations are off.

prune it back

As in gardening so it is in poetry, one should not be afraid to cut back the growth.

nice nice

No one seems to want to call out a bad poem.

pure presence

a poem is something in the midst of a white plane
fenced in by itself and enclosed by the surface of its lines.
although it has forgotten where and how it came to be,
it is no lost soul
[…]
a pure presence
each poem is a shell around a kernel possibly invented
each poem is a translation of the one poem that exists only in translation
each poem is its own condition
a poem is that which declares itself to be a poem

—Jutta Schutting, the start and ending of “Poems,” from In der Sprache der Inseln, Contemporary Austrian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press, 1986), edited and translated by Beth Bjorklund

seen via envy

Parody is jealousy with an illuminating purpose.

show 'em hell

After their first portfolios were turned in, the creative writing teacher thought one of the students must have misheard the admonishment “Show, don’t tell,” as “Show ‘em hell.”

sparsely furnished

For my living space all I require for furnishings are a bed and a bookcase.

mind to matter

The poem lives in the mind as aspiration, and resides on the page as a compromise.

different reading

Reading a play is another kind of reading.

narrative explained

A narrative poem carries a story however unconventionally it’s told.

aide-memoire

Forty years later Jonathan Swift wrote, in his Advice to a Young Poet, that ‘a commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without’, for ‘poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories’.

—Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 2024)

odd entries

Search engines have made them obsolete and yet I have trouble letting go of my collection of reference books. From my reference books what I miss now are those odd entries catching my eye as I went paging through them toward whatever it was I was hunting for.

you can get there

If you really know the end of the poem, then you can get there.

way leads on to way

There are books you mean to read but never get to, and those you read and mean to reread but never do, and so it goes like Frost’s famous lines, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”

she brushed your brow

A line like a mother’s hand passed over your brow.

be a picker

Poet, be a picker. Find the worth in what others throw away

adjectives arise

Start a review of a book of poems by listing all the adjectives that come to mind while reading the book.

lack of urban planning

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein associated language with "an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

seen for what it is

To be acknowledged and accepted, not only must the work of art be created, but it must be seen (experienced); and seen through the correct cultural lens.

runes and ruins

A notebook of runes, ruins.

lowered into the depths

Lines like a trawler's nets lowered into the depths of the psyche—no telling what they’ll dredge up.

top down

Your title is cliché…it’s all going downhill from there.

never expedient

Poetry as exposition that eschews expediency.

aesthetic cage

Don’t forget that one’s aesthetic can be one’s cage.

captains courageous

The courage of good criticism.

thirty years

Today we held a thirtieth anniversary reading of the poets who have met at my house since early 1995. I told someone after the reading, how much I valued the 'soft deadline' of having to press an inchoate poem into in a presentable state before the weekly meeting.

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
-
I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
-
If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
-
I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
-
Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
-
Books are made out of books.
-
Language is always an abbreviation.
-
The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
-
When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
-
Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
-
Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
-
The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
-
A poem is just a shape.
-
The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

large language models

Poets have been making use of AI LLMs for ages, just more slowly than racks of servers.

inferred from life

A good line of poetry is an inference from experience.

not supposed to be there

A sneaky, chameleon-like line that hid itself in the poem and evaded cross-out.

start scrubbing

I can easily imagine this piece as an erasure poem.

way of thought

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
     thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
     to me
Have made poetry.

—George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” [section 9], The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 1971)

unusual path

A poem by the language less travelled.

the many vs. the few

Spew words versus few words: the dialectic of contemporary poetry.

where poems come from

I have three children, but I only write about the troubled one.

doesn't stand up

A poetry of lame polemics.

who wrote that

I’ve got nothing to write about right now. Good thing my notebook has some half-formed notions and false starts that someone has recorded in my handwriting.

counting house poet

Chaucer’s poetic career in the years after 1372 shows how closely the movement of vernacular literary ideas tracked with the Italians’ international trading networks, and his work embodies that trade in ideas, frequently using accountancy—a young, exciting discipline—as a metaphor for moral reckoning. Noting how important those ideas were to Chaucer, his biographer Marion Turner goes so far as to call him, ‘the poet of the counting house’.

—Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis, 2024)

not much to go on

A poem may start with a premise, or only a promise.

elements unfolding

In a poem what matters is how the elements unfold.

ambulance chasing

The ambulance chasing poet was always first to write about the latest disaster.

too narrow a margin

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Theorem

I have a truly marvelous draft of this poem which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Poem

charged line

The poetic line must be continuously charged.

allow it to happen

Let’s have fewer ‘generative’ workshops and more that are inspirational.

age overturned

The movement to free verse at start of the twentieth century, the turning away from regular meters and rhyme schemes, was much like the great shift in painting that occurred in the late 1200s in Italy. Driven by Cimabue and then Giotto, it brought naturalism into painting that too long had relied on the formulas that make early paintings look stilted and unreal to modern eyes.

image of note

London’s unsteady skyline
was not a reassuring one
but like a graph that measures
markets, snails and heartbeats.

—Fanny Howe, second stanza of “Primrose for X” from Love and I (Graywolf Press, 2019)