obviously magnificent

You can’t explain the poem: you can’t say what it’s about, you can’t even make a claim for it as a poem, yet it manifests itself in the space of the page and declares itself magnificent.

about poems

It’s about the poems not where they were published.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

—William Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

first things

A poem establishes itself first in language and then you get what it’s about.

suspect subject

Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me.

―Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (Norton, 1979)

things about

The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
the statues will have gone back to be things about.

—Wallace Stevens, from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

[This afternoon was the twenty-fourth annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash. The guest speaker, Langdon Hammer, featured the poem “An Ordinary Evening…” in his talk entitled The Virtual Stevens.]

afraid of having said

You have a right to write about nothing, as I have a right to skip reading what you’ve written.

sweet sounding things

Avoid a poetry that would whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

approximal readings

No one knew what the poem was about. But each reading was about right.

not about words

Afraid the poem would be about something, the poet wrote what amounted to nothing but words.

not much there

For good or for bad, poets keep proving you can write a poem about almost nothing at all.

utter limits

Wholly unafraid of writing about anything.