anything goes

In poetry anything is permitted, which both holds it open to discovery and stirs it into chaos.

no need

Using a formal device does drive poems in different and unexpected directions, sometimes yielding a real discovery, but sometimes you just a write a poem that neither you nor the world needed.

foreign language

A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn to read it. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden. There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.

—Guy Davenport, A Balthus Notebook (David Zwirner Books, n.d.)

ars longa

Always there are writers who won’t survive their discovery phase.

act of survival

Because those poems that move me are enactments of discovery, not retellings. In those poems that change me the speaker is most often the protagonist, not the narrator. The narrator knows he will survive the poem. The protagonist never knows if he will even make it to the end; the poem itself becomes the act of survival, the act of flailing and probing, an open desire for grace or change. I think this is what Stevens meant when he said the poem is the act of the mind in the process of finding what will suffice. Not having found what will….

—Jorie Graham, “Pleasure,’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (Avon Book, 1985), edited by Stephen Berg.

narrowed to error

Constraints are both opportunities for escape and discovery and pinch points where many forced errors occur.

pay dirt

The poet is a prospector finding ore in the played-out mine of time-honored themes.

no hardcopy

To think of a digital Dickinson, her poems locked away in some scrapped hard drive.

uses of erudition

A scholarly erudition employed for uncovering versus a speculative erudition used for discovery.