be peak

A poet intends to make the poem a peak experience.

[after Maslow]

what kind of

Poet, ask what kind of ‘flower’, what kind of ‘bird’, what ‘tree’?

style relies

Style relies and rides on a substrate of substance.

in one's backyard

The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.

—Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (Penguin Books, 1976)

after reticence

Best are the poems that arise after a period of reticence.

in afterlife

Sometimes you only catch up to a poet’s work after their death.

against spill

Poet, don’t just spill—distill.

messy business

It's easy for a workshop group to retreat into craft talk, when they should be doing the messier and more rigorous work of group therapy

machine or animal

Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I’ll fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools….But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too—depending on your stance, an animal with a machine skeleton (say Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say Robocop). I’ll say here that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we don’t ‘own’….If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine); we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream.

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

not it

Poetry: It’s not what you think it is. As you catch hold of it, it changes. As you define it, it becomes different

no breach

I felt the poet wanted to overwhelm me with words. Good luck.

cut it

That most poems could be shorter is perhaps a cliché—then remember that all clichés started as truths.

high intonation

For most people poetry is like opera: something beautiful being sung with high intonation, but whether someone is to be betrothed or someone is being entombed, none know.

one bad line

One bad move nullifies forty good ones.
—Bernhard Horwitz

One bad line nullifies forty good ones.

bouncy house

For some reason he’d put off reading the book, only to find it was built for a reader to bounce around in.

[Upon reading Terrance Hayes' Watch Your Language.]

gone asemic

Reading the words of the poem, the mind stumbling over them for lack of coherent language beyond some presumed idiosyncratic intent, one wished the letters themselves could be obscured to the point of asemic writing, where at least one could engage the work on a purely visual level.

among books

He awoke one morning, a book splayed over his chest, and for a time he wasn’t sure whether or not he was actually living in the back of a used bookshop, unbeknownst to the shopkeeper.

about to clap

About to clap, put your hands in your lap…apparently the poet didn’t see that passage as the place to close.

slalom pole

A line break for a poet is like a slalom pole—you have to hit the turn without plowing over it.

face-plant

A face-plant first line—no graceful recovery from that.

written disappointment

A big book of poems, a Collected was delivered today, but a porch pirate snagged it. I’d like to believe the book changed her/his life…or it would be interesting to study the face of whoever opened the package.

and one tree

When you feel paralyzed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull or predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree.

—Brenda Hillman, from “Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan U. Press, 2022)

mistaken landscape

I remember once reading a new draft of a poem I was quite proud of, only to be corrected after by a member of the audience, that the mountains I called Sierra Madre must have been Sierra Nevada, given other details of locale in the poem.(Gah...a head-slap here). He was right. Somehow John Huston's classic movie had insinuated its landscape into my composition, and I hadn't noticed it.

sad case

The sad case of a poet who proved himself capable of all the poetic forms.

one stanza

One stanza can stand for and hold up an entire poem.

this led to that

This book led me to that book which led me to next book I read, so on and on I read this way.

[Preparing for a presentation on the topic of commonplace books next Saturday.]

lays claim

Poetry lays claim to all language-made things that fit no other genre.

form before effect

The poem used words that perfected the form, but that sacrificed its effect.

let there be flowers

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

—Mahmoud Darwish
From the poem, “To a Young Poet”
Translation by Fady Joudah

finding a gift

One of the pleasures of reorganizing my books is that inevitably I find I’ve got a duplicate or two. That gives me an opportunity to give away a book as a gift to someone I think will appreciate it.

poet jumps in

Power outage: the band couldn’t play, no laser light show. Then a poet jumped up onto the stage and enthralled all within the circle of how far a human voice can carry.

made thing

I went to a poetry reading tonight: Just wow—the human voice and all the experience contained therein expressed openly, asking for no safety—trusting the made thing that is the poem.

[The 59th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program with Brenda Hillman]

emerging poet

No longer an emerging poet, I imagine myself a cicada, buried in the ground at a shallow depth, wrapped in a paper casing of my poems, waiting to emerge from the earth seventeen years hence. For no reason. Making sounds no one wants the hear.

broken things

Their broken lines and broken lives, those troubled poets so impossible to ignore.

handling details

…for we must bear in mind that, when we look at a landscape, or any other extensive object, the eye in fact embraces exactly only one thing, or point, at a time. Every object, but the particular one upon which our eyes are fixed at the moment, is noticed only in part….In a good picture, therefore, this rule is observed; and, and while the one object on which the eyes are intended to dwell in particular is worked out fully, surrounding objects and details are left much elaborate; witness Murillo’s best pictures.
[…]
Let it not be supposed, however, that I disclaim all details in drawing; I only beg for them in their proper place; for, according to the very true Turkish proverb:
“He who knows not the details knows not the whole.”
[…]
It is, therefore, a mistake to try and acquire at once a bold and rapid style; it can only come by study and by practice, since it is the result of being familiar with details. These need not always be told in the drawing, but there can be no good drawing without a thorough knowledge of them.

—S. C. Malan, Aphorisms on Drawing (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1856)

[n.b.: Quite an interesting biography of a clergyman, polyglot, and largely self-taught painter, Solomon Caesar Malan.]

singular world

I know no great poem that is not a world of its own.

hard and soft

Hard nouns are images, soft nouns are abstractions.

some bite, most nibble

Only courageous literary critics pronounce and speculate, while most are timid and content with contextualizing and anatomizing.

clean slate

The only way to write a poem is to forgive yourself for all the bad ones you’ve made.

many lines

If a poet lives long enough the lines on his/her face exceed their written ones.

[Thinking of Auden]

according to their lights

“Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.” Two free associations here. The first: a friend of Elizabeth’s gave the book in which this poem appeared to her husband, himself something of a fisherman. He singled out “The Fish” for special praise, saying “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Four years later this man published a novella, a fishing story some of us will remember as ending quite differently from the poem. He called it The Old Man and the Sea. Now what are the facts behind such fictions? It would surprise nobody to learn that, in his long career as a sportsman, Ernest Hemingway let go far more fish than Elizabeth Bishop ever hooked. Besides, her fish wasn’t let go at all, not in real life; she told in an interview about bringing it proudly back to the dock—intact. But both she and Hemingway, whatever their private strengths and weaknesses, were concerned in their work with attitudes, “emblems of conduct”—or shall we say, some form of moral headgear—for the reader who wanders out unprotected into the elements Thus, both fish are invested with grandeur and wisdom, and the respective fishermen behave nobly, even reverently, according to their lights. That remark about her poem, Elizabeth told the interviewer, “meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H. and I were really a lot alike.”

—James Merrill, “A Class Day Talk,” Recitative (Northpoint Press, 1986)

literary junk-drawer

A junk-drawer where we save things we think may be of use to us sometime in the future, or in which we toss parts of things we intend to work on later. A commonplace book—one's literary junk-drawer.

nothing like it

Poet, write the poem that doesn’t remind you of any other poem.

allegory goes on

An allegory is a belabored metaphor.

first, second or third

All poems, cast in first, second or third person, are persona poems.

knew too much

He worried that he knew too much about how poems work to write one.

physical response

I think it’s that combustible interaction between the arbitrary imagination and the real that produces Dickinson’s physical response, a sensation I myself have had, once on a plane after reading the first pages of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s book-length poem, Alphabet. Reading those first few lines, I felt a fizzy, rushing heat rise from my stomach to my throat. I couldn’t wait to read the next page, and the next, and the next. It also made me want to re-create this experience in words for myself.

Another way of saying it: I know I’m in the presence of poetry when I, too, want to write it.

—Paisley Rekdal, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically (Norton, 2024)

poets resist

By definition a poet resists word prediction.

felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

pin it

Poet, pin it all on one poem.

no free writer

He didn’t free write. He only wrote when a poem, however uncertain or half-formed, arose in him and wanted to be made.

mind poem

I wrote the poem in my mind and there it stayed.

ars longa odds

A bad wager to put it all on art over life.

repetitions or rhymes

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, could be rescued from distraction only by finding certain repetitions or rhymes in this experience….Thus he required two phenomena to reveal to him one essence, as if essences needed to appear a second time in order to appear at all. A mind less volatile and retentive, but more concentrated and loyal, might easily have discerned the eternal essence in any single momentary fact. It might also have felt the scale of values imposed on things by human nature, and might have been carried towards some by an innate love and away from others by a quick repulsion: something which in Proust is remarkably rare. Yet this very inhumanity and innocent openness, this inclination to be led on by endlessly rambling perception, makes his testimony to the reality of essences all the more remarkable. We could not have asked for a more competent or more unexpected witness to the fact that life as it flows is so much time wasted, and that nothing can ever be recovered or truly possessed save under the form of eternity which is also, as he tell us, the form of art.

—George Santayana, “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz

[The above quote could be applied to the poetry of John Ashbery.]

believe before be

Before the poem can be, it must be an utterance you believe in.

unlikely impetus

Look to the verbiage of signs, menus, instruction manuals, ingredient labels, fabric tags, etc.— any odd text that may be the impetus for a poem.

feature not flaw

A line that doesn’t make sense in a poem is a feature not a flaw. It shakes the reader from the rote act of reading.

last things

In his journal for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (7 March 1961), Merton wrote, "Determined to write less, to gradually vanish." He added, at the end of that entry, "The last thing I will give up writing will be this journal and notebooks and poems. No more books of piety."

Quoted by Frederick Smock in his essay “Merton and Silence,” The Merton Journal, 2008, volume 15 number 1

one pure word

One pure word could cure this poem.

both known and felt

Any long poem of worth will be known by its passages while being felt as a whole.

me or the beam

Most poets want to tell their own stories while a few want to illuminate the world.

poetics in four words

Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Pied Beauty” gave the best statement of a poetics: “All things counter, original, spare, strange...”

nothing there

That poem in the ether must not preclude your writing of the real poem.

it's dark inside

The sewer system that is interiority.

measured response

It was a polite political poem.

shades of red

Vergil maintained delicate distinctions in his poetry for particular shades of red he saw: ruber, sanquineus, roseus, cruentus, rutilus, and sandyx. Ovid liked cruor (blood) and mavors (poetic for Mars).

—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors (Henry Holt & Co., 1994)

had a pulse

Because a few iambs continued to beat inside the poem the poet was able to bring it back to life.

like anyone's life

If a poet wore a bodycam you’d be surprised how boring the recording was.

what art must do

Like in the lyrics to that Evanescence song (Bring Me to Life), the charge to all artists and poets should be: “Wake me up inside.”

blotted letters

Clotted with words, it was a blot poem.

indeterminate inflorescence

59.
I say this often, but a poem is collection of words that were trying to get away. When you’re joining the next line to the previous one, the new line has to be the same as the old but different. You’ll know what the last line is only when you get there. Like how you’ll know how you die only when you die.

61.
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

110.
Truth, goodness, and beauty exist in a symmetrical structure within the object. Observe Hongyemun Gate. It has no supporting structure and simply exists in a structure of itself. Once the structure of an object is discovered, there is no need for any other rhetoric or embellishment. There isn’t much else that needs to be done.

146.
Unlike army soldiers, navy sailors grow their hair a little longer. It’s easier that way to grab onto when pulling them out of the water. That’s what details are like. The things that decide life or death have always been the smallest things.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (ALLEN LANE/Penguin, 2023), translated by Anton Hur

odds are against

A poem has as much chance of being perfect as the person who composed it has.

universal resources

The poet has a vocabulary and experience enough for a universe.

not under warranty

Bad rejection: We are mailing back most of your manuscript because our office’s paper shredder shuddered and stopped working after the first handful of pages were fed into it.

language unleashed

The poem being a force of language.

between sense and nonsense

It is clear that the poem [Kubla Khan] does not make sense. It would be impossible, for example, to draw a map of the pleasure dome, though many have tried. A ‘chasm’ that slants down a green hill ‘athwart a cedarn cover’ is hard to visualise. On the other hand, the poem does make sense to the extent that it is composed of sentences that work grammatically. It is not a collection of random words assembled by free association, as the work of the French Symbolist poets at times seems to be. Coleridge was a profoundly learned thinker and critic as well as a poet, and in ‘Kubla Khan’ he has discovered the space between sense and nonsense where great poetry lies.

—John Carey, 100 Poets: A Little Anthology (Yale U. Press, 2021)

radiant theme

Even when not explicitly stated, the theme radiates from the poem.

killer lyric

Poet, write the killer lyric.

moved by sound

The kind of poem that while reading it silently you can feel your lips and tongue begin to move.

mister fix-it

After a leg broke off the old table, he fixed it with what had at hand: a stack of books under one corner stabilized it nicely.