language preceding language

One of [Dada’s] founders, the German poet Hugo Ball tells how, on June 23, 1916, in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, hiding his face behind a mask by Hans Arp, he recited, to the astonishment, indignation, and fascination of the audience, a phonetic poem consisting entirely of nonsense syllables and meaningless words. Ball’s experience, as he himself recounts it, lucidly and with feeling bordering on religious trance; it was a regression to the magic spell, or more precisely, to a language preceding language: “With those poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism. We returned to the profound alchemy of the Word, beyond words, thus preserving poetry within its last sacred domain.”

—Octavio Paz, "Reading and Contemplation," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

form finds a function

Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free verse poem reinvents the poem.
[…]
When you’re working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.

“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.

—Ursula Le Guin, “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts,” afterword to Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014 (PM Pres, 2015)

sleight of letters

The word is the alphabet’s prestidigitation.

escape artist

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

— Paul Muldoon, The Irish Times, 19 April 2003

cast out

A poem that was read as though it were a magic spell.

numbers game

Sonneteers are numerologists convinced of the magical power of fourteen.

making magic

All the magic in the making.

magic in creation

Revision is difficult because all the magic is there in the first draft.

wannaBeats

It was a reading full of wannaBeats, but the magic of a specific time can't be reclaimed by declaiming in a similar style.

two kinds of poetry

Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then.

—Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (Columbia University Press. © 2007)

lexical magic

The poem as lexical magic.