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."