many lines

If a poet lives long enough the lines on his/her face exceed their written ones.

[Thinking of Auden]

according to their lights

“Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.” Two free associations here. The first: a friend of Elizabeth’s gave the book in which this poem appeared to her husband, himself something of a fisherman. He singled out “The Fish” for special praise, saying “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Four years later this man published a novella, a fishing story some of us will remember as ending quite differently from the poem. He called it The Old Man and the Sea. Now what are the facts behind such fictions? It would surprise nobody to learn that, in his long career as a sportsman, Ernest Hemingway let go far more fish than Elizabeth Bishop ever hooked. Besides, her fish wasn’t let go at all, not in real life; she told in an interview about bringing it proudly back to the dock—intact. But both she and Hemingway, whatever their private strengths and weaknesses, were concerned in their work with attitudes, “emblems of conduct”—or shall we say, some form of moral headgear—for the reader who wanders out unprotected into the elements Thus, both fish are invested with grandeur and wisdom, and the respective fishermen behave nobly, even reverently, according to their lights. That remark about her poem, Elizabeth told the interviewer, “meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H. and I were really a lot alike.”

—James Merrill, “A Class Day Talk,” Recitative (Northpoint Press, 1986)

literary junk-drawer

A junk-drawer where we save things we think may be of use to us sometime in the future, or in which we toss parts of things we intend to work on later. A commonplace book—one's literary junk-drawer.

nothing like it

Poet, write the poem that doesn’t remind you of any other poem.

allegory goes on

An allegory is a belabored metaphor.

first, second or third

All poems, cast in first, second or third person, are persona poems.

knew too much

He worried that he knew too much about how poems work to write one.

physical response

I think it’s that combustible interaction between the arbitrary imagination and the real that produces Dickinson’s physical response, a sensation I myself have had, once on a plane after reading the first pages of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s book-length poem, Alphabet. Reading those first few lines, I felt a fizzy, rushing heat rise from my stomach to my throat. I couldn’t wait to read the next page, and the next, and the next. It also made me want to re-create this experience in words for myself.

Another way of saying it: I know I’m in the presence of poetry when I, too, want to write it.

—Paisley Rekdal, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically (Norton, 2024)

poets resist

By definition a poet resists word prediction.

felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

pin it

Poet, pin it all on one poem.

no free writer

He didn’t free write. He only wrote when a poem, however uncertain or half-formed, arose in him and wanted to be made.

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