form finds a function

Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free verse poem reinvents the poem.
[…]
When you’re working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.

“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.

—Ursula Le Guin, “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts,” afterword to Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014 (PM Pres, 2015)

aesthetic choice

An eclectic aesthetics. A monolithic aesthetics. A widespread aesthetics. A one-track aesthetics.

some go this way, some the other

A fork in one’s life: religion or art.

gourmand

A language like English will always try to eat the choicest parts of foreign languages.

the visual or the musical

…whether we should finally compare Pound’s free verse to ancient musical notations, as if it indicated the placement of varying scales, tones, or, on the other hand, compare it to sculpture, as does Donald Davie, seems a question worth asking, though not worth answering. After all, if Pound did not trouble himself to choose either the visual or the musical as modernist poetry’s sister art, I see no reason why readers should have to make the choice on his behalf. Still, by listening to Pound’s Imagist poems (no only reading, analyzing, interpreting, source-hunting), one may hear the music of the twentieth century having “just forced, or forcing itself into words.”

—Alex Shakespeare, “Poetry Which Moves By Its Music,” Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (UNO Press, 2013), edited by John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H.R. Stonback.

some words on a page

I want to give you
something I’ve made

some words on a page—as if
to say 'Here are some blue beads’

or, 'Here's a bright red leaf I found on
the sidewalk” (because

to find is to choose, and choice
is made).

—Denise Levertov, “The Rights,” Here & Now (1957), reprinted in the Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960 (New Directions, 1979)

party crashers

The poem was a wild party of words, where you imagined some words were eyeing one another, thinking how did he/she get in here.

as stock-in-trade

A poet will always have a few choice words for you.

cleaning house

The anthologist was guilty of aesthetic cleansing.

moral motive

Writing a political poem is more of a moral obligation and less often a matter of choice.

critical translation

With so much choice and bias in the process, translation becomes a form of criticism.

take a side

Ultimately, the poet must decide whether to side with the word or the world.

kind of craft

Part of craft is selection of content.

revolution of dreams

Because the mechanistic imagery I had used so far had begun to horrify me, and certainly contradicted in intent and almost in coloration what I wanted to do next, it suggests that a new imagery must be found, less like a crustacean’s shell. But to change one’s images is like trying to revolutionize one’s dreams. It can’t be done overnight. Nor can it be effected by will. I find one entry reading: “Something seems to have been broken in me last year, like a spring breaking…What broke…is perhaps the sense that you can build your life by choice. Now I think you build it out of necessities—and that is all you can do is answer these necessities in the decentest way possible…I am trying to learn to lead a decent life and not want to be a great person and, at the same time, know what I have the human right to draw the line at.”

—Jane Cooper, “Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread,” essay in The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (Norton, 2000)