small door

The door
We go through—
So small.

The rooms
We enter—immense.

—Gregory Orr, The City of Poetry (Sarabande Books, Quarternote Chapbook Series #10. 2012)

root cellar

You haven’t gone down to basement of this poem. There's a root cellar with a door hanging by one hinge and some cobwebs waiting to be pushed open.

first door

When a poet has had a long career, like Philip Levine’s, it seems to matter what book/door you first entered. For me, when it comes to Levine, it’s The Names of the Lost.

one way

One door: Wonder.

living in brooklyn

I could often tell when it was a poet at the door. They tend to knock in five-beat intervals.

reading matter

Not long ago I wrote a series of poems in response to the collection, The Dream We Carry, by Olav Hauge, a Norwegian. He opened a door for me that I had not known stood closed. He deals in elementals. “A good poem,” he wrote, “should smell of tea, / or of raw earth and freshly cut wood.”

Art is a conversation with the past. Sometimes it is an argument.

—Frederick Smock, On Poetry: Palm-Of-The-Hand Essays (Broadstone Books, 2017)

thin thing

Slide a poem under the door.

a door and a window

My sense of the poem is rather classic. I think of a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't believe in open form. A poem may be open, but then it doesn't have form. Merely to stop a poem is not to end it. I don't want to suggest that I believe in neat little resolutions. To put a logical cap on a poem is to suffocate its original impulse. Just as the truly great piece of architecture moves beyond itself into its environment, into the landscape and the sky, so the kind of poetic closure that interests me bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought. I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

—Stanley Kunitz, "The Art of Poetry No. 29," an interview by Chris Busa, The Paris Review (Spring 1982, No. 83)

everything a door

Everything is a door
all one needs is the light push of thought
Something's about to happen
               said one of us

[...]

Everything is a door
              everything a bridge
now we are walking on the other bank
down there look runs the river of centuries
the river of signs
There look runs the river of stars
embracing splitting joining again
they speak to each other in a language of fire
their struggles and loves
are creations and destructions of entire worlds

—Octavio Paz, "Clear Nights" from Salamander, in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 (New Directions, 1987) edited by Eliot Weinberger.

empty cage

The poem was a finely constructed cage, but the door was unclasped and the bird within had flown.

closed to some

So many poems are shaped like doors; and some really are.