after reticence

Best are the poems that arise after a period of reticence.

in afterlife

Sometimes you only catch up to a poet’s work after their death.

against spill

Poet, don’t just spill—distill.

messy business

It's easy for a workshop group to retreat into craft talk, when they should be doing the messier and more rigorous work of group therapy

machine or animal

Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I’ll fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools….But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too—depending on your stance, an animal with a machine skeleton (say Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say Robocop). I’ll say here that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we don’t ‘own’….If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine); we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream.

—Terrance Hayes, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023)

not it

Poetry: It’s not what you think it is. As you catch hold of it, it changes. As you define it, it becomes different

no breach

I felt the poet wanted to overwhelm me with words. Good luck.

cut it

That most poems could be shorter is perhaps a cliché—then remember that all clichés started as truths.

high intonation

For most people poetry is like opera: something beautiful being sung with high intonation, but whether someone is to be betrothed or someone is being entombed, none know.

one bad line

One bad move nullifies forty good ones.
—Bernhard Horwitz

One bad line nullifies forty good ones.

bouncy house

For some reason he’d put off reading the book, only to find it was built for a reader to bounce around in.

[Upon reading Terrance Hayes' Watch Your Language.]

gone asemic

Reading the words of the poem, the mind stumbling over them for lack of coherent language beyond some presumed idiosyncratic intent, one wished the letters themselves could be obscured to the point of asemic writing, where at least one could engage the work on a purely visual level.

among books

He awoke one morning, a book splayed over his chest, and for a time he wasn’t sure whether or not he was actually living in the back of a used bookshop, unbeknownst to the shopkeeper.

about to clap

About to clap, put your hands in your lap…apparently the poet didn’t see that passage as the place to close.

slalom pole

A line break for a poet is like a slalom pole—you have to hit the turn without plowing over it.

face-plant

A face-plant first line—no graceful recovery from that.