not part way

Don’t start this poem unless you mean to finish it.

make quick work of

Be suspicious of what you finish easily.

good lines

Admiring the fit and finish of the poem.

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.

press on

One never finishes a perfect poem.

ongoingingness

                                   ...but, of

course, there are beaches and galaxies and
long, long poems: I’ve begun to think that
nothing in the world is so important as a long,
long poem, a place anyone’s obsession can be

found lost in, an ongoingingness too reliable to
conclude, a problem that doesn’t finish
its way out of existence, a clinging that holds
clinging on as its enterprise...

—A.R. Ammons, from “Scarcities,” an unpublished poem, typescript dated Sept. 15, 1986, Chicago Review (A. R. Ammons issue; 57: 1 / 2 Summer/Autumn 2012)

noble sentences

He [Carl Sandburg] worked for ten years on the Lincoln book. I know that at the end there was a kind of desperation that something might come between himself and getting it done. You can understand if you knew the labor of it. For example, Lincoln was assassinated on a Friday night and he read 300 American sermons delivered the following Sunday—just to search into how the country felt. So you can see behind each sentence in that Lincoln book there was search, search, testing for accuracy and truth into the past then distilling all that chaotic ocean into clear, musical, noble sentences.

Another letter says: “I have reached 2 o’clock in afternoon of Lincoln’s last day…”

—Brenda Ueland, “Carl Sandburg,” Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings (Holy Cow! Press, 1993)

no compromise

To not compromise the poetry through the fit and finish of composition.

poem you should never have started

The poem you should never have started is the only poem you must finish.