poem poet

He was a poem poet not a book poet.

light fare

He’d tasted some of this, some of that,
but he never made a meal of one book,
nor had he ever feasted for days
at the banquet of an author’s oeuvre.

shut up

Closing the book a few pages in is the reader’s way of shutting up the author.

my break

James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, the book that hooked me on poetry.

book before horse

Poets more concerned over publications than whether they’re read.

a book set aside

He'd set aside the book about a decade ago and just today picked it up again as though nothing had happened in between.

brief dip

A book he could tell early on he would not read in full.

first door

When a poet has had a long career, like Philip Levine’s, it seems to matter what book/door you first entered. For me, when it comes to Levine, it’s The Names of the Lost.

not imprimatur

Print is not imprimatur: A poem being in a book is not the poem’s imprimatur.

best parts

Sometimes the best things about a book are its preface or afterword, it’s footnotes or its bibliography.

block off the chip

The book I ordered, a study of the fragment in literature, arrived today. Turns out it’s over four-hundred pages.

non-literary

There are authors who I say to myself, I’d rather see the movie than read the book.

beyond the book

Books often don’t go on, but certain poems do persist in the public consciousness.

the poem

I’m more interested in the poem than the book of poems.

all in the index

He bragged he could write the whole book by simply perusing its index.

body before book

He was still young enough to prefer taking someone’s body to bed rather than a book.

dog-ear bookmark

The dog-eared page could mark an important passage, a run of words to return to, or it could mean a stopping place, when then where the book was closed, set aside and never opened again.

end and beginning

As I closed the book I sensed that a face turned from me to drift toward another reader.

five year mark

It took me two years to find the book, and three more before I finished reading it.

page count: one

A broadside equal to a whole book.