make fake

Form can falsify content.

you talking to me

So many poets speak about not being in control of a poem’s making, as if some divine inspiration came over them or the poem had somehow been dictated out of the air around them. It’s you, it’s all you…get over it.

voice in space

So little scene making or description: The poem was a voice coming from unseen speakers hanging somewhere above a white backdrop.

we have lift off

The text was about to levitate from the page the poem was so full of epiphanies.

root system

Most young poets start out with a reverence for a past defined for them by someone else. Here are the great poems, they are told; these are the exemplars to learn from….in those years I thought of myself as merely concerned with writing poems. I applied myself to the craft of a stanza, or to learning a more agile syntax. But the self-limitation failed. I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language. They seek out their own progenitors.

—Eavan Boland, title essay of A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (WW Norton, 2011)

masterclass my ass

A term I dislike is "masterclass." Masterclass my ass. The link below came in a marketing email from the Academy of American Poets that hit my inbox and made me laugh. I know some people who do derangemnt and transgression quite well and they never took a masterclass to get good at it: "Queering the Poetic Line: A Masterclass on Derangement and Transgression with Dawn Lundy Martin."

line into lie

A poet who changes a word to make a rhyme turns the line into a lie.

got it

Too many poets write beyond the point where the reader in her/his mind says ‘I got it’. However clever or compelling the premise, the theme, the notion, the conceit, etc., don’t write beyond the ‘I got it’.

startle title

Don’t use the device of a ‘startle title’ too many times. If you do, you run the risk that many readers won’t read on beyond the title, or that what they do read beyond it seems lesser than its promise.

name mispronounced

After J.H. Prynne died, I realized in speaking to a poet-friend about the obituary that I’d been mispronouncing his name for many years, meaning the very few times in those many years that I had reason to bring up his name in conversation. I was pronouncing his name like the folk singer’s name, John Prine. Perhaps that's another gauge of how well-known a writer is—that one can go on mispronouncing the name without correction.

life inside the lyric

The narrative in a lyric poem is the poet’s life instilled up to that point.

creativity cretins

Caution: There are many cults run by creativity promoters.

happy to meet you

There may be others who have loved poetry more deeply and read it more broadly than you, but they are few.

art resists

An artist must live in a constant state of resistance.

popular but lesser

Among themselves, poets tend to discount the talent of celebrity poets.

not true

Too much of formal poetry is not true to the individual or to the world— it’s only true to its form.

often afraid

17.
Unexpectedly, late one night, a friend leans close to ask me what I want people to say about my poems after I’m gone.

I don’t ask what he means by gone. I dismiss the question. I change the subject, but the question stays with me for days until I come up with an answer.

His poems were fearless, though he was often afraid.

—Derek JG Williams, Poetry is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022)

flip-turn

A prose poet should meet the margin with same energy as a competitive swimmer’s flip-turn, pushing off the pool wall.

genre error

Nothing is more off-putting than a poet disappointed about how poetry (theirs in particular) is not being widely noticed.

skin in the game

Poet, be thankful the typo you suffered was not a tattoo.

casual crit

There is need for more casual criticism—and less overly footnoted and cautiously argued academic criticism.

power of intimacy

[Toi Derricotte’s] poems insist on the power of intimacy and, perhaps more significantly, the power of vulnerability. To choose such a stance where most would choose the armor of bravado or detachment requires considerable will and skill.

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