root system

Most young poets start out with a reverence for a past defined for them by someone else. Here are the great poems, they are told; these are the exemplars to learn from….in those years I thought of myself as merely concerned with writing poems. I applied myself to the craft of a stanza, or to learning a more agile syntax. But the self-limitation failed. I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language. They seek out their own progenitors.

—Eavan Boland, title essay of A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (WW Norton, 2011)

machine or animal

Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I’ll fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools….But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too—depending on your stance, an animal with a machine skeleton (say Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say Robocop). I’ll say here that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we don’t ‘own’….If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine); we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream.

—Terrance Hayes, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023)

mystery first

In the composition of poetry mystery must be foremost and then mastery follows after.

no nails

When the materials were available, they commissioned a contractor to build a three-story mission house exactly like the one that had been destroyed by fire. In the compound, carpenters cut timbers, gouged mortises, shaped tenons, whittled scores of wooden pegs and bored holes for them, until all the parts for the house were in a neat pile; then, in three days, they put the whole thing together,...without any nails as all.

—John Hersey, Hiroshima: A new edition with a final chapter written 40 years after the explosion, (Knopf, 1985), 85.

make it sing

Poet, take pains to make it sing.

veil of artifice

A formalist who hides his lack of poetic verve behind a scrim of crafted verse. He doesn’t have the nerve to leave the verse behind.

well-made well-worn

Often the talk of craft, the importance of craft, belies a conservative approach when it comes to art-making.

trusting translation

Reading a translation is a matter of trust. At least one must trust that a good amount of craft and poetic sensibility went into making the translation.

sentences comment

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

—Sol Lewitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art"

[First published in 0-9 (New York), 1969, and Art-Language (England), May 1969]

scale and duration

Pure technical mastery on a large scale or over a long period always commands admiration.

craft spirit

Perhaps we need less of the creative spirit and more of the attention to craft.

original small batch producer

Poetry was way ahead of the craft and artisanal movement.

sure surrender

It is not possible to understand without surrender. As long as the slightest inclination to criticism remains in the consciousness it is hopeless to do justice to what is strange.

Beauty is not intrinsic in any form—it comes to make that form.

To critics: Write of the quick, as you do of the dead, with the same detachment.

Every aesthetic expression is dynamic and therefore involves distortion.

Too much craft in art ruins the art in the craft.

One can live for years with nothing on outside but a few hours with nothing in inside; that applies to art also.

Art never improves, only changes.

—Margaret Preston, Aphorisms (Art in Australia, LTD, 1929)

well-wrought ask

A question must be composed better than a statement.

good lines

Admiring the fit and finish of the poem.

crazy craft

When craft transcends control and becomes obsession, it starts to get interesting again.

pure and applied

The ‘pure’ is the imagination, the ‘applied’ is the craft.

grudge match

Craft vs. Grit.

polished away

When craft is pressed to an extreme that gleam that was the thing’s original light becomes a sheen

uncorrected sight

Never let craft eclipse vision.