knew too much

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

write your own

You realize you haven’t lived the life to write that poem, but that’s no reason not to write your own.

[after reading a Jack Gilbert poem]

lives of the poets

I thought of Chiang Yen who dreamed that Kuo P’o, long
dead, appeared and asked for his writing brush back, and
after he awoke Chiang Yen never wrote poems again.
-
I thought of Tsu Yung who, at his examination, wrote a
a poem of only four lines. Questioned by the examiner, he
replied: “That was all I had to say.”

—Eliot Weinberger, The Life of Tu Fu (New Directions, 2024)

[More excerpts over at Tramp Freighter.]

blank block

[This page unintentionally left blank.]

who wrote that

I’ve got nothing to write about right now. Good thing my notebook has some half-formed notions and false starts that someone has recorded in my handwriting.

walk for one word

I went out for a walk to find the word I was looking for.

Out for a walk, I have often found the words I was looking for lying about in the landscape, as easy to gather as bending to pick up a stone or reaching up to snap off a dead twig.

on hold

Block: Even Dial-a-Poem put me on hold.

locked and blocked

The lines of the poem threatening to rotate over, becoming prison bars.

not today

Today all I could do is stare into my notbook [sic].

naming rights

With his writing and publishing not going well, he hatched a scheme to begin copyrighting the works of Anonymous as his own.

against foie gras

One’s notebook should not be force-fed.

no rain

Block: Why will the letters not rain over the desert blankness of the page?

not blocked enough

After reading a book with two-thirds too many pages of poetry, I wished that more poets complained of ‘publication block’.

seen from a window

Sometimes finding the words is a matter of turning away from the page and looking out the window. Sometimes it requires leaving the building and going for a walk.

write differently

The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing in not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently.

—Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994, p. 3)

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

standards set

The standards you hold yourself to are too high to write anything. Your standards to write anything are too low.

words for the taking

Artists need materials. Musicians need instruments. Poet, please don’t complain when words are all about you, free for the taking.

after dante

In the middle of making my poem,
I found I was lost in a dark wood.

to parts unknown

A missing persona poem.