shades of red

Vergil maintained delicate distinctions in his poetry for particular shades of red he saw: ruber, sanquineus, roseus, cruentus, rutilus, and sandyx. Ovid liked cruor (blood) and mavors (poetic for Mars).

—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors (Henry Holt & Co., 1994)

had a pulse

Because a few iambs continued to beat inside the poem the poet was able to bring it back to life.

like anyone's life

If a poet wore a bodycam you’d be surprised how boring the recording was.

what art must do

Like in the lyrics to that Evanescence song (Bring Me to Life), the charge to all artists and poets should be: “Wake me up inside.”

blotted letters

Clotted with words, it was a blot poem.

indeterminate inflorescence

59.
I say this often, but a poem is collection of words that were trying to get away. When you’re joining the next line to the previous one, the new line has to be the same as the old but different. You’ll know what the last line is only when you get there. Like how you’ll know how you die only when you die.

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.

110.
Truth, goodness, and beauty exist in a symmetrical structure within the object. Observe Hongyemun Gate. It has no supporting structure and simply exists in a structure of itself. Once the structure of an object is discovered, there is no need for any other rhetoric or embellishment. There isn’t much else that needs to be done.

146.
Unlike army soldiers, navy sailors grow their hair a little longer. It’s easier that way to grab onto when pulling them out of the water. That’s what details are like. The things that decide life or death have always been the smallest things.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (ALLEN LANE/Penguin, 2023), translated by Anton Hur

odds are against

A poem has as much chance of being perfect as the person who composed it has.

universal resources

The poet has a vocabulary and experience enough for a universe.

not under warranty

Bad rejection: We are mailing back most of your manuscript because our office’s paper shredder shuddered and stopped working after the first handful of pages were fed into it.

language unleashed

The poem being a force of language.

between sense and nonsense

It is clear that the poem [Kubla Khan] does not make sense. It would be impossible, for example, to draw a map of the pleasure dome, though many have tried. A ‘chasm’ that slants down a green hill ‘athwart a cedarn cover’ is hard to visualise. On the other hand, the poem does make sense to the extent that it is composed of sentences that work grammatically. It is not a collection of random words assembled by free association, as the work of the French Symbolist poets at times seems to be. Coleridge was a profoundly learned thinker and critic as well as a poet, and in ‘Kubla Khan’ he has discovered the space between sense and nonsense where great poetry lies.

—John Carey, 100 Poets: A Little Anthology (Yale U. Press, 2021)

radiant theme

Even when not explicitly stated, the theme radiates from the poem.

killer lyric

Poet, write the killer lyric.

moved by sound

The kind of poem that while reading it silently you can feel your lips and tongue begin to move.

mister fix-it

After a leg broke off the old table, he fixed it with what had at hand: a stack of books under one corner stabilized it nicely.