face it

My best poems are written in the furrows of my brow, in the wrinkled lines radiating from around my eyes.

all eyes

The poet walked into the room and all eyes were on her; and her eyes took them all in, because looking was prelude to language.

speak from the eyes

Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech. Each poetic utterance is an emancipation of the eye, a transcription of the visible into the brute, the undeciphered code of being. The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen—as if for the first time—and henceforth to be given their names. The poet, who is the first man to be born, is also the last. He is Adam, but he is also the end of all generations: the mute heir of the builders of Babel. For it is he who must learn to speak from his eyes—and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.

—Paul Auster. "The Decisive Moment", Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays (Picador, 2019)

metaphor must

A metaphor should make the eyes widen, blink or squint, or even bulge from the head. A metaphor shouldn’t pass without reaction.

meter was his métier

He could scan a line of poetry with his eyes closed.

poet materializes

When he introduced himself as a poet, the other party nodded his head, his eyes unfocused, trying to imagine what exactly that meant.

eyes open

Poet, even during sleep, don’t close your eyes.

first sight

First sight, best sight. To describe with new eyes.

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

just passing through

We call them passages because we are unlikely to pass our eyes over them again.

weeds

Milkweed

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At the touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.

—James Wright

eyes open

Each day a poet wakes with new eyes for the same world.

two halves

“You’re published now,” I told her, “in your eyes, your whole air,
so your poem is half of the truth, and the other half is the reader.”

—Mona Van Duyn, “An Essay on Criticism,” Merciful Disguises: Published and Unpublished Poems (Atheneum, 1973)

lily light

    Light lily lily light light lily light

    Imagically
    Lightli ly

    Outline stones for the wind

    All creatures come
    To mind to oneness

Light first and last, and lilies and lights along the way. The alleyway, in just that way and just that order, pleasured my eyes. Of course it was a happiness to say. “Only the lull I like” wrote Whitman. If I can see it, it must be moving; and when I see it, I am moving too. The lull is not a pause. The lull is an ensemble underway, and as I found, anything I might say would be an adverb. [157]

Donald Revell, The Art of Attention (Graywolf Press, 2007)

sleepy head

Those first few lines were still wiping the sleep from their eyes.

reading with your lips moving

A poem that entered your mind through the eyes, yet instantly caused you to mouth the words.