one off

High praise or dismissive: I know of no poem like this.

who does the work

Similes might require more explanatory writing on the part of the poet, but metaphors require more active interpretation on the part of the reader.

—Paisley Rekdal, “What Images Are In The Poem?,” Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically (WW Norton, 2024), p51

no way out

Poet, write a poem there’s no way out of.

don't be simple

No one needs a simple simile.

poem makes book

A single poem that made the book.

undefined and infinite

Poetry has no definition because the modalities of a poem are infinite.

physical force

An image that had the force of intaglio.

was that bad

He was such a bad poet that even when he plagiarized poetry it was worse than his own writing.

overwhelmingly

All poems are flawed: Ask if the piece overcomes the flaws overwhelmingly.

low light line

If one could write a line of poetry like the low late in the day autumn light.

kairos concerned

Lyric poetry, by its very nature, has always been less concerned with continuous, historical or epical time, with chronos, than with kairos and what Joyce called epiphanies, moments in which experience or vision is concentrated or crystalized. Lyrical poetry, therefore, was more dependent on the unity of inner experience—that is, of the experiencing consciousness—than on that sequence of outer events which provided a framework for verse or prose narrative.

—Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the Nineteen-sixties (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1979)

built on books

When I see their trucks going up & down the streets, I like to recall that Amazon started out by selling books online.

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.