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.

path of half-truths

There are hundreds of ways for a poem to fail, but the easiest course is to falsify.

inflection point

A book of poems that if it didn’t change the course of poetry, at least inflected it.

long gone

I read the poem for a while, and then, my being unnecessary to its course, I just let it go on without me.

step and breath

Poetry that is not palliative, not a cure for pain and loss; rather it is a course, a way forward if only by the step of a next breath speaking a word.

sound of a blindman's cane striking

Just back from Germany, I thought I'd post something by a German poet...

I write poems to orient myself in reality. I view them as trigonometric points or buoys that mark a course in an unknown area. Only through writing do things take on reality for me. Reality is my goal, not my presupposition. First, I must establish it.
[...]
Let us use the word “definition” for these trigonometric signs. Such definitions are not only useful for the writer but it is absolutely necessary that he set them up. In each good line of poetry I hear the cane of the blindman striking: I am on secure ground now.

—Gunter Eich, "Some Remarks on 'Literature and Reality',”
Valuable Nail: Selected Poems of Gunter Eich,
Oberlin College Press, 1981, translated by Stuart Freibert