and one tree

When you feel paralyzed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull or predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree.

—Brenda Hillman, from “Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan U. Press, 2022)

hats and coats

There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.

—Isaac D’Israeli, in the essay “Literary Fashions,” Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3). Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield

language resources

Considering whether there is a hierarchy of language resources one can deploy in writing poetry: I think there are greater and lesser resources and then there are ones that rise and fall by the fashion of the times, and some that better serve the subjective predilections of this or that poet.

fashion hound

An editor who favored the fashion of the times over that poetry which defied its times.

prevailing wind

A poet who was a weathervane of the zeitgeist.

page turned

An anthology of poems that had fallen out of the anthologies.

piecemeal

Six fragments in search of a poem. [after Pirandello]

wild one

Poet, when they go vogue, you go rogue.

good tailor

Like a good tailor who fashions a suit that fits one man (or even two) resplendently; and an overcoat that might suit two or three—thus for me might my poems be made ‘to fit’, in one case (or perhaps in two or three). This comparison is somewhat deprecatory (only in a superficial sense); but it is, I think, accurate and reassuring. If my poems do not fit in a general sense, then they fit in a particular sense. This is no small matter. Their truth is, in this fashion, guaranteed.

—C.P. Cavafy, Selected Prose Works (U. of Michigan Press, 2010), translated by Peter Jeffreys

follows no wave

The poem is oblivious to fashion.

short shelf life

A poem full of fad words, some already starting to fade.

time stain

A poem tainted by its times.

facio fugit

A style compelling as fashion but about as durable.

so over

The moment it was a movement it was over.

permanent things

Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.

—Robinson Jeffers, preface to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Random House, 1938,(p. XV)

different standards

It was a poem manufactured to meet precise critical standards; thus it failed the test of art.

all we can be sure of

     The only danger is not going far enough…we are speaking here of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.
     If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
     All we can be sure of is that our art has life in time, it serves human meaning, it blazes on the night of the spirit; all we can be sure of is that at our most subjective we are universal; all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974, pp. 201-202

cheese graters

The fashion for fragments: Another poet who has taken a cheese grater to his brain. Can you not synthesize, configure, integrate or make whole?

so far ahead as to seem behind

...poetry, which is generally ahead of its time, may go so far ahead as to seem behind in time.

—Eugenio Montale, Poet in Our Time, translated by Alastair Hamilton (Marion Boyars, 1976)