beginning and end

The beginning and the end of a poem provide its essential structure. Not that what happens in between doesn’t matter, it does, but with that essential outer support it’s likely to stand.

about to clap

About to clap, put your hands in your lap…apparently the poet didn’t see that passage as the place to close.

you can get there

If you really know the end of the poem, then you can get there.

afraid it will end

One of those poems you could feel getting longer. A good long poem gets shorter; in fact, you’re afraid it will end.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

—William Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

bad blurb

I confess I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this story. I had to skip ahead many pages to get to that comforting sigh of the book closing.

end happens

The end of a poem happens; you can’t try to explain the end.

until it turns

A poetic line begins but doesn’t have a known end, until it turns.

see through

The agon of the unfinished: I see it, I see through it, I cannot see it through.

end or beginning

Was it the last line of this poem, or the first line of the next?

end of it

That poet gets credit for reaching a boundary condition. But that’s it.

not the marrying kind

The couplet rimes were a bad match: One was turning in circles at the altar, and the other forgot the ring.

as an artist

As an artist, you should not wish to create what you don’t feel you have to create.

People who read only the Classics are sure to remain up-to-date.

There is a poet in every competent person; this comes out when they write, read, speak or listen.

Art originated in a longing for the superfluous.

The spirit of a language is revealed most clearly through its untranslatable words.

Philosophers arrive at conclusions, poets must allow theirs to develop.

The old saw “It’s always hard to begin” only applies to skills. In art nothing is harder than to end, which means at the same time to perfect.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms (Ariadne Press, 1994), translated by David Scrase and Wolfgang Mieder.

end in sight

Always a bad sign in reading a book when you find yourself flipping ahead to see how many pages to the end.

end anywhere

He didn’t write discrete poems. Each poem ended in some random moment of dailiness: a bathroom break, the kettle singing on the stove, a Jehovah’s Witness knocking at the door, the trash wheeled out to the street, falling asleep in a chair, etc.

no outlet

You knew at the turn, the line was going to be a dead-end. Still, you had to drive to the very end, get out and look around.

not bounded

No matter its first and last line a poem has no beginning or end.

so let it

The poem will not end, so let it trail off. The poem will not resolve, so let it be a blur.