no course charted

It’s common for poets to say they have no idea where their poems are going when they start writing them, and one can readily see this is true by the poems themselves.

commonplaceholders

The poem wore its common images like merit badges on a boy scout’s sash.

down to words

Because it’s made of such common material (our words), poetry survives (and even thrives) in the most dire and desperate of circumstances.

singularity

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture on a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

—Basil Bunting, The Codex