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.