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.