many lines

If a poet lives long enough the lines on his/her face exceed their written ones.

[Thinking of Auden]

dissolving lines

A poem that was dissolving in the mind even before you reached the last line.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

lowered into the depths

Lines like a trawler's nets lowered into the depths of the psyche—no telling what they’ll dredge up.

architecture without lines

Claude Monet on his Rouen Cathedral series…

When the British painter Wynford Dewhurst asked for an account of the Rouen pictures, Monet replied, ‘I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.’
[…]
‘I have wanted to do architecture without doing its features, without the lines.’

Quoted in Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Knopf, 2024)

no ball of light

A poet who wrote attractive lines and phrases that never would cohere into the force of a poem.

face it

My best poems are written in the furrows of my brow, in the wrinkled lines radiating from around my eyes.

cow of the world

There are lines for which a poet will not be forgotten, nor forgiven.

[Thinking of Richard Wilbur's "We milk the cow of the world...", from "Epistemology"]

limit test

A sonnet is a poem testing the limits of fourteen lines.

wrenched diction

Lines that are wrenched suggest a powerful emotion has wrenched them, such as Hopkin’s, “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind”; but even the slightest displacement of customary acts or values will do it. For instance, “We once were in love, made love and kissed without a harmful history,” [Hardy] puts kissing after love and last in an amorous past blessed by brevity.

—William H. Gass, “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence,” Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011)

workshop of the three little pigs

When the wolf came upon the first poem he could see the lines were just straw. A half-inhale was all it took to blow away the poem. The second poem he came to was made of sticks, and with a great gust of breath he blew apart the poem. But the last poem he encountered was a stanza made of brick, and no matter how hard he tried to blow and blow, the brick box held.

lines configured as a web

The poet tries to make consecutive horizontal lines configure themselves as a web in the mind.

cards play themselves

In poker, when the cards are laid on the table, we say ‘the cards play themselves’: no interpretation needed to determine who has the better hand. So it should be in book reviewing—quote heavily from the book, and let the lines themselves show their relative value.

prose poetry defined

Lines that yearn for the roominess enjoyed by sentences in a paragraph.

chop chop

This or that critic, as a way of calling a poem basic, often balks at its being “just prose chopped up into lines.” Reader, this statement may sound radical at first, but it couldn’t be more obvious. Poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. I mean this to be final, categorical, and no slight to poetry.

—Elisa Gabbert, “What Poetry Is,” The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018)

gifted lines

Cento:
I couldn’t think of anything on my own,
so I offer you these lines by others.

invisible web

Though written in discrete parallel lines the poem is a web of connections.

desert trek

An arid read: Page after page yielding few quotable lines.

holus-bolus

The poem that comes holus-bolus while being sequentially laid out in lines.

unwieldy lines

Though written in level and even lines, unwieldy was what he was going for.