early risers

The dawn is a term for the early morning used by poets and other people who don’t have to get up.

—Oliver Herford

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

certain things

One thing is certain, and I have always known it—the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about...

—May Sarton, quoted in From May Sarton’s Well: Writings of May Sarton (Papier-Mache Press, 1994), selection and photographs by Edith Royce Schade. (p. 46)

time sensitive

Different times different poems: A poem written late at night. A poem written at first light.

poems on paper cups

I think poems should be printed on paper coffee cups. I like to think of them being read early in the morning when the mind is fresh. A brown stain running down the side through the lines. Seeing them rolling about half-crushed along the curb.

line light

One can tell by the light in the lines whether a morning poet, an afternoon into evening poet, or an after midnight poet.