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

the way in

In poetry, surprise is often a matter of perspective.

turn heads

The artist should develop a turn of mind that tends to turn things on their heads.

see it slant

Before you can ‘tell it slant’ you must first see it at an angle.

loving and severe spirit

Among the many senses that modern painters have lost, we must number the sense of architecture. The edifice accompanying the human figure, whether alone or in a group, whether in a scene from life or in an historical drama, was a great concern of the ancients. They applied themselves to it with loving and severe spirit, studying and perfecting the laws of perspective. A landscape enclosed in the arch of a portico or in the square or rectangle of a window acquires a greater metaphysical value, because it is solidified and isolated from the surrounding space. Architecture completes nature. It marks an advance of human intellect in the field of metaphysical discoveries.

—Giorgio De Chirico, “The Sense of Architecture,” Artists on Art (Pantheon Books, 1945)

outside looking on

A poet on the periphery…where else would s/he be?

rockstar poet

There are about one-hundred rockstar poets. Rockstars in the sense that they could command a good paycheck for a reading at a university auditorium or local arts center; not in the sense that they could fill even the lower tier in a small civic arena.

maximaus

Another minor poet with major poet attitude.

larger than life

The image may be of something small or minor, but becomes monumental by the unique perspective of the seeing.

odd angle

Critic, see it slant.

literal leeway

Poets will always allow themselves to be less literal than they would otherwise condone as readers of others’ writings.

not seeing out

Too many poems are mirrors when they should be windows.

not poetry itself

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958), lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955-56.

We have to remember that what we observe is not poetry itself, but poetry exposed to our method of questioning.

exploded world

Critics talking about ‘supertechnology’ and ‘the mediated eye’ in the seventies and eighties couldn’t know they were living in the Stone Age.

site and vector

The subject matters: A matter of perspective or approach.

first stumbling efforts

So the enthusiastic praise often lavished on works employing innovatory techniques, new stylistic tricks, novelties of form or medium is misplaced unless these bring, or have the potential to bring, some new aesthetic character of value. In this respect those who inveigh against the cult of the original are right; but equally, those are wrong who decry any extreme stylistic or technical innovation before assessing what is being done with it or what might be, what new worlds of aesthetic experience are opened up. Who could have foreseen the glories to be achieved, faced with the first stumbling efforts in sonnet form or the first essays in pictorial perspective?

—Frank Sibley, “Originality and Value”