tacking offshore

The poem was like one of those sailboats you see in the distance, draft by draft it would tack many times and never get closer.

name only

A poet whose name is important but whose poetry is rarely quoted.

criticism for criticism's sake

In its effort to keep pace with the imaginative writers, much of the most intelligent criticism of our time has become ‘Criticism for Criticism’s sake,’ as D.J. Enright has called it. Although, as long ago as 1924, Edwin Muir wrote that ‘all criticism is criticism for criticism’s sake,’ his observation does not contradict Enright’s; for Muir continued: ‘It is a moral habit carried over into art.’ Instead of mediating between the work of art and a nonspecialist public, it has become as specialized and as difficult as modern poetry is reputed to be; more difficult often, because poetry has its own way of communicating complex perceptions, and because critics have added their own complexities to those of their texts.

—Michael Hamburger, “Puerile Utopia and Brutal Mirage,” The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry for Baudelaire to Nineteen-sixties (Harcourt, Brace, 1970)

able beauty

The beauty of poetry is being able to write poetry.

late to realize

Unfortunately as poets we must realize that revision is the real writing.

expired images

Revisiting some old poems, the poet found some of the best images had anachronized.

art in the shadow

Under the overhang of new and innovative art, in that shadow, other art, equal to what overshadows it, can still be made.

poetries plural and impure

There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Vallejo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for Audre Lorde and Aimé Césaire, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple.

—Adrienne Rich, "Poetry & Commitment: An Essay" (2007)

my pets

When putting together a manuscript of poems one can see the words and phrasings favored too much.

is this mine

He read haltingly and with a puzzled expression on his face, as though he wasn’t reading his own work, but rather someone had handed him an unknown text before he came to podium.

flailed at

The first line promised what the rest of the poem only flailed at.

press gang

Treating words like a press gang, he wrote with a lash and cattle prod.

referential character of words

[T.S. Eliot] has carried, one wants to say with a sort of ‘heroism’, his self-awareness about language into the depths of his poetry, into ‘the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’ and the attack upon ‘the general mess of imprecision of feeling’. Unlike some other poets in the Imagist tradition, Mr Eliot has never lost his respect for words. The desire, as Hulme put it, to ‘hand over sensation bodily’ has never led Mr Eliot to make war upon language after the manner of Mallarmé or Pound. One of the deep characteristics of his poetry is a continual concern, in the midst of difficulties, for the referential character of words. (This one most movingly feels in the Four Quartets.)

—Iris Murdoch, “T.S. Eliot as a Moralist,” Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Allen Lane/Penguin, 1998)

perfect poem

Invisibly written over the field where the swallows swoop and bank.

sonnet stop

Poets are attracted to the sonnet because otherwise they wouldn’t know where to stop.

poetry school

Often I learn from poems. Yesterday a Rilke poem taught me ‘Tanagra’, with the line: ‘to cling to what once was / and smile’.

slip out

To escape but not end, the poem left the back door open.

of a new nature

The nature poem. So inscribed, so written, so set into the tradition of poetry that it can look like an arcane code. But it is not arcane. In fact, the nature poem is volatile: an accurate register of cultural and historic change. Before the Industrial Revolution it was a pastoral poem; and after a pessimistic one. It has always been there, in the center of the action. Like other poetic conventions, it has its roots in deeply human things. Change those things, alter that angle, and the roots will shift, ready to be put somewhere else.

I believe Plath—the other Plath—changed the nature poem. She shifted its course. She re-directed its historic energy. Ariel may seem a slim text to argue with. Then again, many of the shape-changing texts of nature poetry—whether The Lyrical Ballads or North of Boston—are modest, apparently unimposing single volumes. Unimposing that is, until you read them.

—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)

allowed to well up

Poet, allow the music to well up in and around your words.

lowered by a crane

Each successive stanza fell into place as though lowered by a crane.