lowered by a crane

Each successive stanza fell into place as though lowered by a crane.

opposite of towers

Poems are built the opposite way of towers, which are built up from a foundation. Line by stanza the poem is built in the thin air of the imagination while dropping down, always trying to feel for a bottom, find a solid base.

anything not everything

Anything can be a poem but not everything becomes a poem.

you talking to me

So many poets speak about not being in control of a poem’s making, as if some divine inspiration came over them or the poem had somehow been dictated out of the air around them. It’s you, it’s all you…get over it.

mind poem

I wrote the poem in my mind and there it stayed.

nothing there

That poem in the ether must not preclude your writing of the real poem.

theme and form

I always have two things in my head—I always have a theme and the form. The form looks for the theme, the theme looks for the form, and when they come together you’re able to write.

—W.H. Auden, “Obiter Dicta,” W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 1995) by Charles Osborne

get close

You can’t read a poem nor write a poem, unless you can close read a poem.

be rid of it

Borges likes to say that he is lazy.

“If some notion comes into my head, and now and then it does, let’s say a notion about a story or about a poem, I do my best to discourage it. But if it keeps on worrying me then I let it have its way with me and I try to write it down in order to be rid of it.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Words and Their Masters (Doubleday, 1974) p41

it works that way

It wasn’t the poem I meant to write, but it was the poem I did write.

trunk of a tree

When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained,
Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.
Indeed, feeling and expression should never fail to correspond,
As each emotional change wears a new complexion on a sensitive face.
Thought that swells with joy bursts into laughter;
When grief is spoken, words reverberate with endless sighs;
No matter if the work be accomplished in one flash on the page,
Or is the result of the most deliberate brush.

—Lu Chi (261- 303), “The Working Process,” Essay on Literature (translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen), Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century (Grove Press, 1965), edited by Cyril Birch. [This essay was written in rhymed-prose and was composed three years before Lu Chi was executed during a power struggle of the Chin court.]

much worse than that

A poem that had to get much worse before it could be made any better.

mind to paper

One of those poems of the mind that evaporates on paper.

sounds found a way

The sounds found a way to move the poem forward.

still talking

No matter how it started, no matter where it went, he could talk his way out of any poem.

stop short

Look for that preemptive ending that undercuts any temptation toward a grand concluding flourish.

whip hand

Some just ride the poem; some hold the whip and will use it.

no better or worse

A poem that could be endlessly revised and be no better for it.

mind to matter

The poem lives in the mind as aspiration, and resides on the page as a compromise.

you can get there

If you really know the end of the poem, then you can get there.