better fit

Many poets don’t realize their poems would be a better fit as prose.

unpoetic word

I was aware of the word but never conceived of it fitting so well within a poem.

when it all fits

Strange—we are always inhabiting more than one realm of existence—but they all fit in if the art is right.

—Lorine Niedecker, in a letter to Cid Corman, quoted in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place edited by Elizabeth Willis.

good lines

Admiring the fit and finish of the poem.

hard cases

He wrote poems with words that don’t fit well into poems.

leaping junk to junk

How do these seemingly disparate elements weld together? What makes this part or that fit where they do? How does a steel beam fit into its place in David Smith’s sculpture? How do images, and memories they engender, fit into our histories? In his “Conversation about Dante,” Osip Mandelstam notes, “One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.” These mysterious instabilities of making then coalesce into a poem, into this poem.

—James McCorkle, ”The Making of a Poem,” Poems and Their Making: A Conversation (Etruscan Press, 2015), moderated by Philip Brady.

fitted lines

Like in a New England stone wall, the rough edges of words will be what makes them fit together.

pages unable to contain

The megapoem could hardly fit in a codex book. [Thinking of Olson’s “Maximus”]

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