spent life

I’ve spent most of my adult life devoted to poetry, and still how little I know.

poor substitute

In literary works imagination proves to be a poor substitute for experience.

heard them coming

I could hear your rhymes coming, and by the time they landed, I had already found several preferable alternatives.

too smooth

Always the desire to smooth when to disturb would improve the work.

slow approach

When the scholars find a work of art they approach it like archaeologists.

true poems

Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I turn the pages of my own poems gathered in a single volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the old verse that says it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not what I have written but what I should like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have not had the strength to realize.

—Wallace Stevens, acceptance speech at 1955 National Book Awards ceremony (for The Collected Poems, Knopf, 1954)

design + build

Another way to think of poetic form: Not as a template passed down through time, but something designed and built by the language of a particular poem.

remembered poems

Poets make poems but readers make remembered poems.

poetic metaphysics

We can expose the poem’s inner working, and yet not know it fully. Not unlike the soul which we feel but cannot locate within the human body.

cut it

Poet, don’t end the poem—just cut it.

minor bang

A haiku is a pocket universe.

must be precise

#61
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023), translation by Anton Hur

faux po

A poem full of fraud words.

squeeze box

You can tell when the poet is squeezing the language to get a sigh or shriek out of it. Let the emotional content in the writing arise without pressing on the material.

finale-less

Often I’ve left a fireworks show with the sense that the whole experience would have been better without the lighting off of the grand finale. It’s something to consider when concluding a poem.

words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

essential experience

Imagination fails the further it gets from experience.