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)

two kinds of reaching

Here are…two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes–with strength of expression and skill and luck–reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.

—Muriel Rukeyser, from her Preface to The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw-Hill, 1978)

very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

might be both

No easy answer: Was that a poem or a dream you just told me?

sing singular

The dream of writing a poem without a hint or an echo of another poem.

too good for us

The honest editor sent a nice note rejecting my poem, stating that I must place it in a more prestigious journal, for the pages of his magazine would only drag the piece down.

dream imagination

One value of dreams is that they build confidence in the power of our imaginations.

radar screen

It is an accuracy of vision, an account of now, an account of memory or a vision, an account of a dream, of a fiction totally imagined, described, accurately and exactly to our best ability beyond misstatement, beyond misshaping any shape of our idea. In our practice as poets, to be inaccurate becomes a real Lie. All our attention is on the page. We cannot account for the hours spent—we have only the page. A radar screen watcher works a high vigilance profession. Our attention is so intense that it is a vigilance, too.

—Laura Jensen, “Lessons in Form,” Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Wayne Stat U. Press, 1990), edited by James McCorkle

major rhetoric

The dream of a great poem made solely from superior rhetoric.

no turning away

He’d set out to write manifestly great poems: The dream of writing poems that upon first reading drew a devoted audience.

shared dream

I thought she said the poem was “dream of consciousness.”

impressed hard

I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.

—George Tooker (1920-2011), American artist.

unplanned trip

The scheme of the poem, the dream of the poem.

notional value

The dream of a word with a meaning equal to experience.

thought before going to bed

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

—E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (U. of Chicago Press, 1998), translated by Richard Howard.

highest ideality

[T]he function of poetry, like that of science, can only be fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. As the chance note that comes to be supported by a melody becomes in that melody determinate and necessary, and as the melody, when woven into a harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed beyond recall; so the single emotion, the fortuitous dream, launched by the poet into the world of recognizable and immortal forms, looks in that world for its ideal supports and affinities. It must find them or else be blown back among the ghosts. The highest ideality is the comprehension of the real. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience which we have actually had.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), edited by Lee A. Jacobus

dream stream

Poetry: the dream that reality can’t break.

many tongued within one

The dream of being polyglot within one language.

drawer of treasure or dream

As I read the poem it was as though I was slowly sliding open a drawer full of treasure or dream.

figurehead from dream

Poetry comes to me from an always latent dream. I like to direct this dream except on days of inspiration when I have the impression that it directs itself

I don’t like a dream which just drifts (I was going to say which just dreams). I try to make a substantial dream of it, a kind of ship’s figurehead which after crossing inner space and time confronts outside space and time—and for it the outside is the blank page

—Jules Supervielle, “Reflections on the Art of Poetry, 1951,” Selected Poems, edited by George Bogen