old new borrowed blue

For a wedding they say it’s good luck for the bride to wear ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. This could be the model for a good poetry reading: Read something old, read something new, read something borrowed (the generous act of reading another poet’s poem), and the blue will be evident in the reading because it’s poetry.

make it move

New or not, it must move me.

makes itself new

Unless the world stands still, poetry will change.

new evaporate

Even if one’s work is new and original, one must ask whether it escapes the ephemeral.

well said newly seen

An aphorism shouldn’t be (as Pope put it) ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express'd’; for however ‘well expressed’, it will not move us unless the words convey a novel way of seeing an important aspect of the world or our existence.

new into old

[André] Chénier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermès in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopédie of Diderot into a poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. This poem was to treat of man’s position in the Universe, first in an isolated state, and then in society. It remains fragmentary, and though some of the fragments are fine, its attempt at scientific exposition approximates too closely to the manner of Erasmus Darwin to suit a modern ear. Another fragment called L’Invention sums Chénier’s Ars Poetica in the verse “Sur des pensers nouveaux, faisons des vers antiques.” ["From new thoughts, let us make antique verses"]

[1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Chénier, André de]

always alive

To write an evergreen line.

first sight

First sight, best sight. To describe with new eyes.

balance of interests

An image you’ve never experienced versus a well-worn image made new.

two kinds of new

An avant-garde that just is or an avant-garde that exists only as against tradition

odd angle

Critic, see it slant.

new poetics

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.

—Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

vision shifted

“White writing” appeared in my art the way flowers explode over the earth at a given time. With this method I found I could paint the frenetic rhythms of the modern city, something I couldn’t even approach with Renaissance techniques. In other words, through calligraphic line I was able to catch the restless pulse of our cities today. I began working this way in England—in Devonshire in 1935—when I returned from the Orient, where I’d studied Chinese brushwork. So in gentle Devonshire during the night, when I could hear the horses breathing in the field, I painted Broadway and Welcome Hero. In the process I probably experienced the most revolutionary sensations I have ever had in art, because while one part of me was creating these two works, another part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in battle. It may be difficult for one who doesn’t paint to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his angle of vision is being shifted.

—Mark Tobey, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (Da Capo Press, 2000), interviews by Katherine Kuh.

make way for others

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

—Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (Grove Press, 1958), translated by Mary Caroline Richards.

these words

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

Revelation 21:5, King James Version

new poetry

To go back to that time when one was discovering a new passage, a new poet, almost every day.

shift happens

After reading a great poem, something like a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ occurs within the mind. Once you have read the poem your thought patterns are forever altered, your psychic response to events is deflected in an entirely new direction. The page is turned utterly, irrecoverably, so to speak. You will never again be the person you were in the minutes, hours, days and years before you encountered that poem.

slew of new

There seem to be an astounding number of innovative poets, all of them being ‘innovative’ all at once.

nothing new here

He put down his pen and folded his hands because he wasn’t bringing anything ‘new to the tablet’.

words gone astray

A poetry that threatened the language with the prospect of a new dialect.