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.