mind poem

I wrote the poem in my mind and there it stayed.

ars longa odds

A bad wager to put it all on art over life.

repetitions or rhymes

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, could be rescued from distraction only by finding certain repetitions or rhymes in this experience….Thus he required two phenomena to reveal to him one essence, as if essences needed to appear a second time in order to appear at all. A mind less volatile and retentive, but more concentrated and loyal, might easily have discerned the eternal essence in any single momentary fact. It might also have felt the scale of values imposed on things by human nature, and might have been carried towards some by an innate love and away from others by a quick repulsion: something which in Proust is remarkably rare. Yet this very inhumanity and innocent openness, this inclination to be led on by endlessly rambling perception, makes his testimony to the reality of essences all the more remarkable. We could not have asked for a more competent or more unexpected witness to the fact that life as it flows is so much time wasted, and that nothing can ever be recovered or truly possessed save under the form of eternity which is also, as he tell us, the form of art.

—George Santayana, “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz

[The above quote could be applied to the poetry of John Ashbery.]

believe before be

Before the poem can be, it must be an utterance you believe in.

unlikely impetus

Look to the verbiage of signs, menus, instruction manuals, ingredient labels, fabric tags, etc.— any odd text that may be the impetus for a poem.

feature not flaw

A line that doesn’t make sense in a poem is a feature not a flaw. It shakes the reader from the rote act of reading.

last things

In his journal for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (7 March 1961), Merton wrote, "Determined to write less, to gradually vanish." He added, at the end of that entry, "The last thing I will give up writing will be this journal and notebooks and poems. No more books of piety."

Quoted by Frederick Smock in his essay “Merton and Silence,” The Merton Journal, 2008, volume 15 number 1