book of spells

The fortune-teller poet thought you wouldn’t notice that her book of spells was a battered unabridged dictionary.

new worlds

After a youth spent leafing through thick dictionaries, after so many years of reading across various genres, how is it I’m still discovering new words? Which is to say new worlds, as though a telescope trained on deep space as the faintest and most distant of stars slowly become visible.

time out to look up

Being driven to the dictionary by many words in a difficult poem proved to be a blessing, as it gave one time to mull over or to rest the mind, before beginning again.

loose words

The dictionary is dead. Long live the language at large.

ore words

Like Mallarmé he mistakenly thought poems were mined from the dictionary.

particular within universal

Seeing that nearly all the words to be found in the dictionary stand for universals, it is strange that hardly anybody except students of philosophy ever realizes that there are such things as universals. We do not naturally dwell upon those words in a sentence which do not stand for particulars; and if we are forced to dwell upon a word which stands for a universal, we naturally think of it as standing for some one of the particulars that come under the universal.

—Bertand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford Univ. Press, 1959)

dictionary thumper

Poet, be a dictionary-thumping fundamentalist!

locked within the dictionary

I saw the poem locked within the dictionary, and I cut away until it was set free. (after Michelangelo)

driven to the dictionary in vain

A poet should be capable of driving the reader to a dictionary now and again; sometimes in frustration for what is not found therein.