whisper or gurgle

Isaiah 29:4. “And thou shalt be brought down, and speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.” This describes true poetry. Language suffering the condition of its utterance. Like Pier delle Vigna in Dante, “si della scheggia rotta usciva insieme / parole e sangue, che io lasciai la cima / cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme” (So from the broken twig spewed out words and blood, so that I let the branch fall, and stood like a man in fear). All spitting and hissing, primal language of pain, original language. Language is a physical medium, needs blood or dust to come true. Poetry must whisper or gurgle.

—Rosanna Warren, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets (Norton, 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss. [297]

runes and ruins

A notebook of runes, ruins.

who wrote that

I’ve got nothing to write about right now. Good thing my notebook has some half-formed notions and false starts that someone has recorded in my handwriting.

very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

violent forgetting

I notice where a page has been torn out of my notebook and this feels like a violent forgetting.

slow for construction

Writing in a notebook makes composition slower and revision harder, and that can be a good thing.

glories of analog

Makes me sad to think of the young poets who do all their writing on their phones. They will never know the notebook in all its analog glory.

lost & found

Yes, things are lost in the notebook—then things are discovered therein as if you hadn’t written them.

fire-starters

Always surprised to find ready kindling in the notebook. A few phrases, an odd sentence or two, and in no time at all a fire is built.

notebook memory

Memory no match for a notebook at hand.

[Being a digital age, any 'notes app' could suffice.]

blank and expectant

It was one of those lovely blank notebooks you just knew you could write great things in.

fragment or figment

Forever certain there is a magnificent fragment in my notebook, if only I could find it.

not today

Today all I could do is stare into my notbook [sic].

against foie gras

One’s notebook should not be force-fed.

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.

transcendent particulars

The poet-critic Robyn Sarah, quoting from her own notebook entry, in a piece called “Poetry’s Bottom Line,” stated that she had three things she looked for in a poem. The first, that a poem “should transcend its own particulars,” I had no reason to argue with. But the second and third seemed contradictory, perhaps because of the figurative nature of the statements: “2) it should be built to bear weight” and “3) it should have lift.” These two elements are somewhat at odds in the physical world, though both are admirable qualities for a poem. My mind wanted to find an analog for weight-bearing and lift: Just north of where I live there is an airbase where several Lockheed C-5 Galaxy military transport jets take off and land. They can certainly bear weight (many tons of equipment), and have lift enough to bear that weight aloft, though in flight they appear lumbering. Then I thought of a more apt thing from this world: a cathedral. Certainly, as something built of stone, and often buttressed, the cathedral’s arches bear great weight. And by their height, the arches leading to thinner ribs, holding tall stain-glass windows, under a vaulted dome and great spire(s), all of these aspects create ‘uplift,’ as one raises the head upward to gaze in awe, so that if the experience is not one of actual lift, the feeling of a lifting toward the heavens is there, leading one back to her first notion of ‘transcending its particulars’ of stone, timber and glass.

not mine

Leafing through an old notebook, I find many lines that must have been forged in my handwriting.

lost articles

The poems only his notebook has known.

line tension

The first letter steps out slowly onto the tightrope of the ruled-line paper.

first script

No neatly printed page can equal the beauty of handwritten lines in a notebook.