singular world

I know no great poem that is not a world of its own.

test for poetry

Will the poem follow you? Will the poem affix itself to you? Will the poem inflect the course of your life?

canon content

The canon is made of many great poems and a certain number of academic study pieces.

major rhetoric

The dream of a great poem made solely from superior rhetoric.

all the right words

The index of that book seemed like a word list for a great poem.

no turning away

He’d set out to write manifestly great poems: The dream of writing poems that upon first reading drew a devoted audience.

limits of understanding

A great poem cannot be taught, it can only be explored together intelligently.

no language cage

We know a great poem strains to the point of bursting the bounds of its language, but even as it does so it defies any other language to try to capture it in translation.

center of the earth

Many a great poem has accreted around the core of a single image.

street view

Do the great poems open up new avenues or do they create blind alleys that other poets must run down?

wood splitter

A poem that could drive a wedge into the side of the thickest anthology.

never mine

The poem you admire because you wish you’d written it. The poem you admire because you know you never could’ve written it.

big one that didn't get away

Even to be a minor poet one must pull off one major poem.

shift happens

After reading a great poem, something like a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ occurs within the mind. Once you have read the poem your thought patterns are forever altered, your psychic response to events is deflected in an entirely new direction. The page is turned utterly, irrecoverably, so to speak. You will never again be the person you were in the minutes, hours, days and years before you encountered that poem.

gravitational force

Its atmosphere may be poetically alluring in and of itself, but content is the gravitational force of a great poem.

inner and then more

All great poems...by the way they colonize and amplify and enhance the music of our own inner voices, of consciousness and conscience, ask us to be greater than we are, and if we read them well even show us how to begin.

—C. K. Williams, On Whitman (Princeton U. Press, 2010)

reverse engineering

Spent all day reverse engineering a great poem. Still the poetic ghost in the machine never showed itself.

reckless

Always something reckless in the language of a great poem.

roaring loom of time

I would steal Spinoza’s image of the “roaring loom of time’ and state that this is what a great poem eventually becomes.

the poet's Rubicon

When reading a great poem, see if you can tell which line was the poet’s Rubicon.