need to be

It’s a bad poem, but if you needed to write it, maybe it has worth.

deep presence

That poetry is one of humankind’s primal urges.

words that we need

Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the breath when people let themselves be moved by a great force. . . When the words that we need shoot up of themselves, we have a new song.

Orpingalik, an elder of the Netsilingmiut (Netsilik Eskimo), cited in “The place where you go to listen,” by J. L. Adams, Terra Nova: Nature and Culture, 2(3), 1997, 15-16.

[Qoute encountered in Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007) by Tim Ingold.]

information please

It’s not that the poetry was prose that was the problem. Good prose can equal or even exceed poetry on many levels. The problem was that this particular prose was unwilling to give up its inherent attachment to information: prose with its natural empathy for the reader’s need to know more. Poetry is always too ready to ignore the reader’s need for information.

poetry put on the spot

The poem [“We Are Seven”] also stages the transcription of voice that is poetry, lays it out in front of us so that we might count ourselves as implicated within its iteration. I think this is what Wordsworth wanted to achieve in the writing of poetry, and what led to his instruction to the poet in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that he descend from his supposed height and “express himself as other men express themselves.” It also suggests that the transcription of these words into poetry, or what might be called the work of figuration, in some strange way neuters the power of the figurative act; at least it sets up the uneasy thought that poetry may be unable to answer the need it speaks and shows. This is equivalent to the demand that poetry reveal or acknowledge its own power; to ask of poetry the source of that power given that the words from which it is made are nothing more than reflections, echoes, transcriptions.

—Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001, p. 116)

unseasonal verse

It's a good idea to write a poem about the first of May in November or December, when you feel a desperate need for May.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (1926)