language paradox

For the poet the language paradox is that it is the way and it's what gets in the way.

words that are

Words that don’t amount to content evaporate and become worthless.

layer of gauze

The more some poets write the thinner their work gets: the emotion, the thinking, the aesthetic effect, all become like a layer of gauze.

splendid poverties

I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago, I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles.
[…]
The pebbles stayed in their otherness, stayed forever in memory. Can language do justice to such moments of heightened consciousness? Speech is always less. When it comes to conveying what it means to be truly conscious, one approximates, one fails miserably.

Wittgenstein puts it this way: “What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses ‘itself’ in language, we cannot express by means of language. This has been my experience many times. Words are impoverishments, splendid poverties.

—Charles Simic, “Reading Philosophy at Night,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)

not exactly

Never offer an exact wording for a revision during a workshop. It’s your voice and not the poet’s and it will taken as an overstepping.

passed gas

He was a poet who farted epiphanies.

faux avant

There are poets who make a weak attempt toward making the poem ‘avant’, like using no capitalization or punctuation, or using variable spacing, while the poem itself reads smoothly as though conventionally composed, and the content is common and pat.

style outlasts content

Sometimes a poet runs out of content, while the style glides on.

lapsed poem

A poem that extends beyond twenty lines has lapsed into prose in places.

muck around with words

And then there are at every lyrical street corner, experiments that muck around with the so-called word-material. Poems are also gifts—gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies.

—Paul Celan, letter to Hans Bender, Conversation in the Mountains: Collected Prose (New Directions, 2026)

front and center

The best poems present themselves. Then there are the others which must be sought.

cutting room

Criticism in a workshop must operate aphoristically—elaborated musings full of digressions are frowned upon—thereby the critique can seem cutting, jabby.

art not poetry

Unreadable, yet beautiful as a physical document, it was a work of art but not poetry.