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.
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I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
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If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
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I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
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Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
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Books are made out of books.
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Language is always an abbreviation.
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The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
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When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
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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.
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Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
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The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
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A poem is just a shape.
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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)