word well

For a poet, each word is a well: dark, deep, full of echoes, and the faint reflection of water.

echo form

Two people walk into a poetry reading late, while the reader is reciting her pantoum. The guy says to his date, 'Gosh, there's a terrible echo in this room'.

sing singular

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

mental link

Metaphor as mind-rhyme.

listen up, people

Another online litmag with one of those masthead manifestos written by an editor too young to understand how much his exhortations sound like echoes.

echo chamber

That is, in poetry more than in any other verbal genre, readers bring an expectation that not only do all the elements matter down to the comma and the white space at the end of a line and between or within stanzas, but that each of those elements, no matter how widely arrayed, may tug at other elements and condition the whole. The poem is an echo chamber where we listen to the reverberations that otherwise dissolve into the white noise of anxiety.

—Lee Upton, “Poetry, Defined. Briefly.” Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo Press, 2012)

sound heavy

He had so much similar rime going on in the poem, I suggested he should ‘echonomize’.

sound bound

Chained to those word echoes.

no echo

When a good poet and good person has died, it feels as though a great hole in the earth has opened and it will give back no echo.

[R.I.P. Kurt Brown]

work song

As one labors through revision one listens for the echo of the original inspiration.

we recognize it

Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter’s success depends upon hitting his hearer’s intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it another way—at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universal Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never seem to condescend...
[…]
The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy, “it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, but so as we recognize it.

—Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pen name ‘Q’), “Poetry”

reader's perogative

When one reads a lot it should not be a surprise, or even a source of consternation, when one’s words happen to echo those of others. A reader doesn't worry when his own words go so far as to paraphrase or to inadvertently plagiarize the words of other writers.

canon echo

Can one’s writing ever get far enough away to escape the canon’s echo?

no echo

A word fell off the end of my line, and vanished into a crevasse of white space. The word with which it had rimed called out to it, but no echo could be heard.