way of thought

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
     thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
     to me
Have made poetry.

—George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” [section 9], The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 1971)

not much

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

unmoved to making

I may be interested in a particular practice of making poetry without the least desire to practice that kind of making myself.

to make of or to listen to

Poets who are not so much makers as they are listeners.

etch in light

There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

—Diane di Prima, from "Rant"

deep space

Why are we so amazed by how poems are formed when the universe holds similar mysteries.

[South Pole Wall]

a poem contends

As soon as it's made, a poem contends with formless that would erase it, that would cause it to fade into the din of background noise.

critical making

All artists are critics by means of their making certain things rather than others, and by making those things in certain ways rather than others.

marking / making

A couple tables away in a café, I watched as a young woman scribbled intently in an ordinary spiral notebook…markings/makings of a new world.

miracle worker

There are no miracles, there is only what you make.

—Tamara de Lempicka

good form

Fortunately we don’t need to know how bad the age is. There is something we can always be doing without reference to how good or how bad the age is. There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, but calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet, might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s co-operation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. For those we haven’t to get a team together before we can play.

—Robert Frost, “The Letter to The Amherst Student*,” Selected Prose of Robert Frost (Collier Books, 1968), edited by Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem. *Written in 1935.

poetry is poetry written

The poet defines poetry in the making of the poem.

critic v. artist

An art learned only from books or earned by the trials of making.

stitching it together

The alphabet is your sewing kit.

taking refuge in work

After reading a spate of flighty and off-the-top-of-the-head kind of poetry, all I want to do is to read some work. I want to see and feel the workmanship that went into a poem’s making.

ever undefined

It is often cited that the root of the word poetry comes from the Greek term poïesis meaning “to make.” But make how? And make what? So much lies undisclosed in the concept of mere ‘making’.

making magic

All the magic in the making.

metaphor making truth

The pure adventurousness of making metaphors and poems is a condition that must be felt to be believed. I remember how tremendously excited I was when I first formulated to myself the proposition that the poet is not to be limited by the literal truth: that he is not trying to tell the truth: he is trying to make it.

—James Dickey, “Metaphor as Pure Adventure,” Sorties (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971)

substitution of terms

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.
—John Godfrey Saxe (lawyer and poet), The Daily Cleveland Herald, March 3, 1869.

Poems, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

make a raft

Wrecked and adrift on the high seas of language, lash the lines together and make a raft.