not unless

The editor said he’d publish my poem if I would agree to strike the last line. I replied that I’d let him publish my poem that way if he’d legally change his name to Notable Dolt.

thus spoken

Specifics accrue to the speaker's authority.

authoritative line

[One point from a list of 14 principles of composition, which he prefaces by saying, "I honestly do not know how consistent I am in using principles of composition. Certainly the compromise between eye and ear is not always the same kind of compromise. Every poem makes its own peculiar demands. Still, I will try to list a few principles by which I generally work."]

11. Don’t explain away a line which has an authority of its own, even if the line may puzzle the intellect—i.e., don’t write for people more interested in understanding a poem than experiencing it. This is not the same as being willfully difficult or obscure, which is merely tiresome.

—Peter Klappert, in “O’Connor The Bad Traveler,” Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (Longman, 1977), edited by Alberta T. Turner

insignia

To say this poem stands for me.

above the sway of things

[Narrator: the painter Masuji Ono, grown old.]
‘Being at Takeda’s,” I told them, ‘taught me an important lesson early in my life. That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority. The Takeda experience taught me never to follow the crowd blindly, but to consider carefully the direction in which I was being pushed. And if there’s one thing I’ve tried to encourage you all to do, it’s been to rise above the sway of things. To rise above the undesirable and decadent influences that have swamped us and have done so much to weaken the fibre of our nation these past ten, fifteen years.’ No doubt I was a little drunk and sounded rather grandiose, but that was the way those sessions around that corner table went.

‘Indeed, Sensei,’ someone said, ‘we must all remember that. We must all endeavor to rise above the sway of things.’

—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, 1989)

not god (sic) enough

Even if a god offered to ghost write the poem the poet would demur.

sargeant major

With a glance at the page, the words started to fall into line and form ranks.

take it to the streets

The street poet was threatened by the local authorities with vagrancy and public nuisance. It was then he knew he’d made it as a poet.

authoritative voice

Poet, be a sergeant major: Bark orders until the reader falls in line.

shaping music

As do the poets, Heraclitus follows language where it leads him, where he is receptive to its inward and autonomous authority, with somnambular yet acutely lucid trust. Hence his recurrent attempts to characterize, to make us party to the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. Day melts into night, night begetting day in subversion of the trenchant Mediterranean light. There is here no distinction between philosophic or scientific finding and poetic form. The springs of thought are identical in both (poiesis). Poetry betrays its daimon when it is too lazy or self-complacent to think deeply (Valéry’s astreindre). In turn, intellection falsifies the shaping music within itself when it forgets that it is poetry.

—George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions, 2011)

authority and uncertainty

Both lyric authority and lyric uncertainty have great attraction.