ursprache

A poet intends to make the poem a peak experience. [after Maslow]

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

Style relies and rides on a substrate of substance.

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...

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

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

Poet, don’t just spill—distill.

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

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, ...

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

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

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

For most people poetry is like opera: something beautiful being sung with high intonation, but whether someone is to be betrothed or someone...

One bad move nullifies forty good ones. — Bernhard Horwitz One bad line nullifies forty good ones.

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...

Reading the words of the poem, the mind stumbling over them for lack of coherent language beyond some presumed idiosyncratic intent, one wis...

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 us...

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

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

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

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...

When you feel paralyzed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull or predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surp...

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 mountai...

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

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

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...

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

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

A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery. — Mahmoud Darwish From the poem, “To a Young Poet” Translation by Fady ...

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 aw...

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 ...

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

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, waiti...

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

…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...

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

Hard nouns are images, soft nouns are abstractions.

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

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

If a poet lives long enough the lines on his/her face exceed their written ones. [Thinking of Auden]

“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 ...

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 wor...

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

An allegory is a belabored metaphor.

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

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

I think it’s that combustible interaction between the arbitrary imagination and the real that produces Dickinson’s physical response, a sens...

By definition a poet resists word prediction.

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

Poet, pin it all on one poem.

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

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

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

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, ...

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

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

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.

In his journal for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (7 March 1961), Merton wrote, "Determined to write less, to gradually vanish." ...

One pure word could cure this poem.

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

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

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

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

The sewer system that is interiority.

It was a polite political poem.

Vergil maintained delicate distinctions in his poetry for particular shades of red he saw: ruber , sanquineus , roseus , cruentus , rutilus ...

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

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

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.”

Clotted with words, it was a blot poem.

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...

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

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

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

The poem being a force of language.