elements unfolding

In a poem what matters is how the elements unfold.

speak esse

Some important elements of the poem must come through in translation, or what hope have we as humankind?

solid, liquid or gas

As a solid the poem is a form, it can be held and viewed easily from all sides. In a liquid state the poem moves, flows, divides and recombines, never easy to contain. As a gas the poem is not easy to see, it rises and dissipates quickly, leaving no trace. The ideal state of a poem is liquid.

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)

transitions matter

The organization and diction of a poem are completely dependent upon one another, and you should not be troubled if your first attempts to sort out the two elements are not successful. The distinction between the two is a real one, and you will soon begin to discover it yourself. You will see that organization resides not so much in the words themselves as in the transitions that separate words, clauses, sentences, and stanzas from one another. When the poet is in control of his medium, these transitions are decidedly meaningful.

—James McMichael, The Style of a Short Poem (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1967)

obedience not invention

Now I believe that much of the work on the poem called “Ghost Ship” amounted to obedience, not invention: obedience, that is, to the preexistent poetry of the ordinary word. To cure—to have a care for—poetry is to keep its elements, the words on the tongue, the symbols of our acts, alive—by suspicion, and attention.

—Mary Kinzie, "The Cure of Poetry," The Cure of Poetry in the Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling (U. of Chicago Press, 1993)

rather than

I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as “interesting,” conventional rather than “designed,” accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non-sequitur and proclaim the duality.

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to “either-or.”

—Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966)

discrete element

In poetry the sentence and sentence fragment coexist harmoniously. The latter being like a sentence in that it’s often bounded by a starting capital letter and the endpoint period, however it’s not meant to function as a grammatical unit; rather the sentence fragment serves as a discrete element of thought, speech, image or breath.