process-centric

We have come to overvalue the process at the expense of the piece itself.

language friction

In some poems we are trying to decrease the friction between the words and the experience they’re trying to convey.

line leads

Sometimes the mind leads the line, and at other times the line leads and the mind must follow.

poet agonistes

She would complain bitterly about her poetry, and then read you something that would make you want to give up the art.

like and different

Now you remember I wished beauty to be considered as regularity or likeness tempered by irregularity or difference...

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Note-books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Humphry House, 1937), p. 74

the wait and the way

For a long time these words have waited to be placed on the page in this way.

no one home

I found no one home in that poem.

prose absorbed

A novel disguised as a poem we call an epic. A short story that fancies itself a poem, we call a long poem. A prose squib becomes a prose poem, and so it goes.

form only

He perfected the poem out of existence—it became form only.

ephemeral poetry

It’s okay for a poetry to be ephemeral, to grace the air as speech, to get a human nod and be gone.

one great bell

As for sound, I live in one great bell of sound when doing a poem; and I like how the syllables do-si-do along. I am not after rhyme—so limited, so mechanical. No, I want all the syllables to be in there like a school of fish, flashing, relating to other syllables in other words (even words not in this poem, of course), fluently carrying the reader by subliminal felicities all the way to the limber last line.

—William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life (U. of Michigan Press, 1986)

poem alone

Bow down, if ever you encounter a poem that stands alone in the history of poetry.

persona all

First-person poems, autobiographical poems and even confessional poems, are all persona poems.

long road

When I hear a poet described as ‘prolific’, I think of the miles and miles of less than good lines, and fewer stopping places that could be called poems.