living document

A poem is a living document.

cheating delete

The problem with digital storage and the cloud is that it makes it easy to allow a bad poem to hang around, to avoid being deleted.

change it

Print is only a temporary arresting of the text—change it if you need to.

says who

Remember that your voice often lies to you.

no much

A few lines of text, a glance at an artwork, several bars of music, is all it takes to determine if you’re in the presence of a real artist.

pure presence

In some of my new pieces, when there is nothing happening, I try to take every possible kind of expectation out of the piece. There is no beginning, development, and end. It’s just nothing. It’s just presence, pure presence.
-
Failure is such a great territory to learn because if you don’t risk you will never go anywhere…So to include failure in your own process of work, it’s essential.
-
Being an artist, you can make things from anything. You can make things from dust. You have this miracle, possibilities.
-
Beauty doesn’t have a definition. What is important is what moves you.
-
I hate when artists from my generation become tired, depressed, and complain about art being dead. It is nonsense. Art is intrinsic to the human being; it is impossible for it to die.
-
You get what you get from me. I don’t hide anything. There is no dark side, because I tell it all.
-
I’m not pretending.
-
To me, good art has to have not just one but many lives.

—Maria Abramović, Abramović-isms (Princeton U. Press, 2024), edited by Larry Warsh

iterations of I

The ‘I’ of the imagined me. The imagined me of the ‘I’. The me of the imagined ‘I’. The imagined ‘I’ of the me.

opposite of towers

Poems are built the opposite way of towers, which are built up from a foundation. Line by stanza the poem is built in the thin air of the imagination while dropping down, always trying to feel for a bottom, find a solid base.

stuffed animals

Poets who anthropomorphize animals remind me of children playing with stuffed animals.

thrill ride

The poem was an amusement park of language thrill rides.

imperfect effect

The best line in a rhymed poem is always one with an imperfect rhyme.

pile on poem

A poem that was the cumulative paraphrase of thousands of poems like it.

trying to paint

She loved poetry. She loved making. She loved painting. She loved “mucking around.” In answer to a question one of my students asked after a reading about process, she said she thought when she was writing she was actually trying to paint. Sometimes she did think it might have been better to be working with her hands. In later years, in the many readings she gave throughout the country, she read equally from her own work and the work of others which sometimes annoyed those who had invited her to read. When I last heard her read, she read poems by Emily Dickinson, Miroslav Valek, Edwin Muir, John Haislip and Laura Riding with an equal number of her own. She believed that poetry, that literature, was a communal endeavor.

—Maxine Scates, recalling her friend the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Uncovering What Is Brave: A Remembrance of Brigit Pegeen Kelly” by Joy Manesiotis and Maxine Scates, Plume #151 March 2024

underwater imagery

All the images were seen as though being underwater, wavery and illusive.

low register talk

It was talk-poetry in a low register.

late notice

The poem you paid no attention to until it started to shine in a corner of your mind.

out there

Ships and books get launched, and then most are never heard from again. Not that they sink and are lost, but they are out there on a vast ocean.

worry word

Poet, keep that worry word.

poem poet

He was a poem poet not a book poet.

anything not everything

Anything can be a poem but not everything becomes a poem.