not much

How much I love a poem made by the least means.

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)

made with feeling

Joan Mitchell:

“I carry my landscapes around with me.”

“Painting is made with feeling. One has to have the guts to feel and love outside oneself.”

“The solitude that I find in my studio is one of plenitude. I am enough for myself. I live fully there.”

[Quotes I copied off cards at the Joan Mitchell retrospective exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Arts]

anything you say

One can love another’s words without believing a word of them.

poetry smitten

One of those poets who was too much in love with poetry.

belongs neither

For [Luce] Irigaray, a philosophy that is also a wisdom of love requires a speech which is not ‘authoritarian’ or ‘pedagogical’. Instead, it should have as its aim the production of a ‘sharing’ between the speaker and the listener. When this occurs: ‘between the two something exists that belongs neither to the one nor to the other, nor moreover to any word. And this something must, in part, remain indeterminate’.

—Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge, 2016) [quoted sections above come from Luce Irigaray’s The Way of Love (London and New York Continuum, 2002), translation by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhàcek.]

wordly love

A poet too much in love with her vocabulary.

admired if not loved

Alexander Pope is not a poet one loves. But Pope lives on by quotable verse that sings and stings.

forever young song

He loved that poem inordinately, like an old song from his youth.

puzzles me most

Though scarcely a confessional poet I write about my life. Impossible not to, really, since it’s what puzzles me most. The lyric voice permits me to acknowledge that, when I write about frames, I may also be writing about my life and, conversely, though I write about what looks like my life I might as well write about any object that is both discrete and amenable, cordial and solitary. Much as any person is. Much as a frame tends to be.

Of the letters of the alphabet, only one works as a perfect frame. It is the O of the gold frame of Michelangelo’s ‘Doni Tondo’, of the mouth of Beckett’s Not I, the o of omphalos and origin, of globe and moon, of look and book, of for and good. Of open and store. Of close and lose. Of hole and whole. Of do and don’t. Of hold and go. Of no and not. Of alone and know and so and old and, yes, love.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

preferred to proffer his own

It became apparent that when he’d said that he loved poetry, he meant his own.

passing fancy

Engaged in a language dalliance.

love over

A love poem must have an undercurrent of loss.

love solved

There is little that a good love poem cannot solve.

zero point

It is evident that poetry shares with all speech that is language-like an incompetence with respect to consummatory states of experience. All indicators of temporaliity—including the present tense—signify distance from the origin of experience…As evidence of this, consider the following very simple observation: there are many poems of not yet having (petitional poems, as it were, or poems of seduction), and there are also poems (though proportionally to the first type many fewer) of having had (doxological poems as it were, e.g., the aubade). But there are no poems (certainly no Western poems) situated upon the zero point of having, of union just so. At that moment, the coincidence of consciousness and experience, language disappears and with it representation as depiction….

—Allen Grossman, “Hard Problems in Poetry, Especially Valuing,” True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing (U. of Chicago Press, 2009)

ingathers only to disgorge

The poem is reservoir for anything, for everything, only to become font of life, love and loss.

mind enamored

Lounging on a divan of gray matter, the poet’s mind was his one inamorata. [Thinking of Wallace Stevens]

exit solo

Sad as it is to say, a great poet of love is dying alone. [Berkeley, CA]

valentine

Poetry books are made thin so you can slip one under your true love’s door.

unconditional

Even though unreciprocated, my love of poetry remains absolute, pure.