be peak

A poet intends to make the poem a peak experience.

[after Maslow]

mind to matter

The poem lives in the mind as aspiration, and resides on the page as a compromise.

life index

A poem that was the index to your existence.

poem as sphere

The lines seem to reconfigure into latitudes and longitudes, making a world.

imagination and integrity

A poem in which the bravura of the imagination is matched by the integrity of the verisimilitude.

multum in parvo

A poem of modest length but majestic in scope.

bright star

An image that could blot the sun.

sing singular

The dream of writing a poem without a hint or an echo of another poem.

holus-bolus

The poem that comes holus-bolus while being sequentially laid out in lines.

high standard

I ask only to write a poem like Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

ideal poem

I write or try to write as if convinced that, prior to my attempt, there existed a true text, a sort of Platonic script, which I had been elected to transcribe or record.

—Donald Justice, "Notes of an Outsider," Platonic Scripts (U. of Michigan Press, 1984)

waist deep and weilding

The intrepid poet wades into language without fear.

poem without bounds

To write an inexhaustible poem.

lit is

To write a singular document.

that poem

The poet suspected he might have to invent a new language in order to write the poem.

strike out a path

They say that poetry dies; poetry cannot die. Had she only one human brain for her asylum she would yet endure for ages, for she would burst forth like the lava of Vesuvius and strike out a path through the most prosaic realities.

—George Sand, Thoughts and Aphorisms from Her Works (Morrison & Gibb Ltd., second edition 1912), arranged by Alfred H. Hyatt

one way

One door: Wonder.

words lifted on high

To be quoted is the apotheosis of anything said or written.

it was

Poetry of a very high order.

always alive

To write an evergreen line.