perfect poem

Invisibly written over the field where the swallows swoop and bank.

invisible hand

A poet is the reverse of a chess-player. He not only doesn’t see the piece and the board, he doesn’t see his own hand—which indeed may not be there.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 153.

word borders

The margins of the page: invisible fence?

silence is the invisible kingdom

Silence in poetry is the place where words come from. The space between an event and that event becoming a poem. Silence stands at the gate, at the opening of the field. Silence gives substance to poems the way death does in life. It is the invisible parts of the poetry. It is the invisibility of what is about to appear. Like a king of the play who is invisible, held back in the wings to build up the tension. The invisible all around us in this world without our seeing it until the poem speaks. The invisible and the silence go hand and hand in poetry. Like the night train pounding through the dark town in Texas as the dogs bark. Silence is emptiness just a little afterwards. Silence is what’s invisible until the poem makes it visible. There is a huge silence built up by implication. The silence that fills up our metaphors, pretending one thing and meaning the invisible other. It is the silence of Basho's haiku. It is what's invisible in the fragments of Emily Dickinson. Silence is the invisible kingdom that the poet makes us see.

(Jack Gilbert writes this and pushes the paper across the table to Linda Gregg.)

[The above is something handwritten by Jack Gilbert late in his life. It was transcribed by me in a phone conversation with Linda Gregg, 01-30-14.]

invisible form

With invisible form, the poet and the form and the material are like somebody riding a horse over broken terrain. The three are constantly changing. The horse and rider accede to the varying hillside, the rider adjusts when the horse finds solutions, the horse adapts to each move the rider makes. And all of it subject to where the rider plans to be that night.

This overall deciding is central to invisible form, since its nature is to implement. It makes the poem do something beyond tactics. Many people feel there should be more democracy in writing poems, that the poem should be allowed to find its own form. But it is not a way to get out of the valley before dark. Given a chance, the horse will spend a lot of time eating…Left to themselves, [poems] lapse into their default state—which is minor poetry.

—Jack Gilbert, “The Craft of the Invisible,” (Ironwood)