slow release

A poem as a slow-release potion.

from mouth to immortality

A poem finds itself most alive in the mouth, but for immortality it must find a place where it’s written down.

preparing to write

Unless you’re brooding, muttering under your breath, pacing away from your desk, then you are probably not ready to write.

two halves

Half of the published poems are a half too long.

abrupt edge

The abrupt edge is actually an ornithological term that I have turned into a metaphor . . . It’s that area of greatest interest and intensity— for birds, of course, but I think also as a metaphor— between the dangerous open space and the bower or covered safe place, let’s say the woods as opposed to an open field—where the danger is, where anything can happen. If [ I ] can find a sense of the experience where there is both danger and safety—and maybe the safety part is the form— then I think I’ve got it right. The danger, of course, would be in the content.

—Stanley Plumly, A Conversation with Maryland Poet Laureate Stanley Plumly by Kathleen Hellen, The Baltimore Review.

get close

You can’t read a poem nor write a poem, unless you can close read a poem.

crack of the lash

Poet, crack that first line like a lash.

driven home

The throughline of the poem ended with a last line that was a stake in the ground.

the subject is

 The poem is the subject of the poem.

not that kind of light

 The flaw of thinking that language could ever illuminate one’s life.

better fit

Many poets don’t realize their poems would be a better fit as prose.

same same

One felt the poet could go on endlessly in the same register and tone of voice.

be rid of it

Borges likes to say that he is lazy.

“If some notion comes into my head, and now and then it does, let’s say a notion about a story or about a poem, I do my best to discourage it. But if it keeps on worrying me then I let it have its way with me and I try to write it down in order to be rid of it.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Words and Their Masters (Doubleday, 1974) p41

shut up

Closing the book a few pages in is the reader’s way of shutting up the author.

mood matters

Remember that your mood will determine how you read or hear a poem.

to have no words

There are many ways to praise a poem, including being struck speechless.

critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

talk talk

Try not to talk your way out of a poem. It’s going to take too long.

whisper or gurgle

Isaiah 29:4. “And thou shalt be brought down, and speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.” This describes true poetry. Language suffering the condition of its utterance. Like Pier delle Vigna in Dante, “si della scheggia rotta usciva insieme / parole e sangue, che io lasciai la cima / cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme” (So from the broken twig spewed out words and blood, so that I let the branch fall, and stood like a man in fear). All spitting and hissing, primal language of pain, original language. Language is a physical medium, needs blood or dust to come true. Poetry must whisper or gurgle.

—Rosanna Warren, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets (Norton, 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss. [297]