in place of a poem

The mountain of text that took the place of a poem.

[A wry riff on Stevens]

no homilies here

There is no place for homilies in poetry.

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

place and experience

When I read "Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh for the first time, I realized that documenting seemingly insignificant events and objects—buses included—are neither ridiculous nor melodramatic. The more I studied his poems and essays, the more I revered how Kavanagh sought to develop a praxis that is both inclusive and individual: not solely concerned with audience and legacy, but more aligned with place and experience.

—Roan Ellis-O’Neill, Hold Open the Door: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology 2022 (University College of Dublin Press), edited by M. McCann, S. Meline, N. Zak/Aria Eipe, M. Prince, and F. Ormsby.

my office

I have spent many hundreds of hours shooting [a basketball] on this court, with its view of the Bay and Oakland hills beyond. One day the view was mysteriously obliterated and my eyes burned, as it turned out by ash from the terrible Oakland hills fire.

There is nowhere that I am more at my ease than in this place, shooting. If I have a poem that I’m working on, I will roll it over and over again in my head, like a child rolling a marble between his fingers, feeling the texture and weight of each syllable. You may think me immodest, but I have done some of my best work up here on Corona Heights, that’s what this place is called. You might say this is my office. Call me a wastrel, if you like.

—August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place.

—Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order (1956), trans. by Rollo H. Myers, 153.

will be written

That city [Tiflis] with all the people I saw in it and with all the things I had gone to experience and all the things I had brought with me will be the same to me as Chopin, Scriabin, Marburg, Venice and Rilke have been, one of the chapters of my Safe Conduct, which goes on all through my life, one of the chapters which, as you know, are not numerous; one of these chapters, and it will be the next one written. I say ‘will be’ because I am a writer, and all this has to be written down and an expression found for it all; I say ‘will be’ because so far as I am concerned it has already become a fact.

—Boris Pasternak, letter to Titian and Nina Tabidze, 13 December 1931, Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

--
I do not write poems. Like a novel, they write
Me, and the course of life accompanies them.

Titian Tabidze (Georgian poet, 1895-1937), died in Stalin's purge of 1937.

figure off-center

Poet, stand apart…and take your place in the world.

art of time and place

The true work of art...is not the work of the individual artist. It is time and it is place, as these perfect themselves.

—Wallace Stevens, Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage, 1965).

[Last evening was the twenty-third annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash. Cole Swensen was the speaker and her presentation was titled, "Perhaps the Truth Depends." She took us on a journey of quotes and pictures related to Stevens' habit of walking, plus some related history of walking poets.]

place or prop

For Wallace Stevens place names were just props in the staging of the poem; they’re not real places.

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

all of what she was

[Lorine Niedecker] wrote to Bob Nero, “I dream of an ease of speech that takes in the universe” (April 20, 1967). At the same time she recalled her beginnings: “Early in life I looked back of our buildings and said, ‘I am what I am because of all this’. “Lake Superior” negotiates the local and the global, the self and the species: we are what we are because of all this. Her point of access is the unselfconscious notations of geology and pre-history. There, through her own painstaking practice, she locates the solace of an immanent infinite.

—Jenny Penberthy, “Writing Lake Superior,” Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (U. of Iowa Press, 2008), edited by Elizabeth Willis.

you are here

The poet who is nomad, living everywhere and nowhere, the poet who leaves home and never comes back, and the poet who stays.

in closing

If nothing else, the last line has pride of place.

poetry made manifest

Seeing Galway Kinnell read his poems wearing an Irish cable knit sweater at Arrowhead, Melville’s house in the Berkshires, circa 1985.

make of the fragments

John Ashbery ends his poem “Street Musicians” with these lines:

      Our question of a place of origin hangs
      Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
      In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
      Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
      On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

We make of the fragments of self a form that holds, briefly—that’s the poem—then we watch it shatter again—which is, I suppose, that space that the poem fooled us into believing we’d left behind us, for a time, world of fragmented selves, hard truths, glinting ambiguities to be negotiated, navigated through as we make our disoriented way forward, or what we have to believe is forward. Like being mapless in tough territory, and knowing, somewhere inside, we’d choose this life, and this one only, if in fact we could choose.

—Carl Phillips, "Beautiful Dreamer," The Art of Daring (Graywolf Press, 2014)

landscape and weather

By 1969 Richard Hugo had completed his third and even his fourth book of poems. As we must expect, it is the Northwest poems which conduct Hugo’s trial by landscape, his arraignment by weather, to a further pitch of excruciation: the menace of place is acknowledged to correspond to destructive energies in the self….

—Richard Howard, “Richard Hugo: Why Track Down Unity When The Diffuse Is So Exacting?,” Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (Atheneum, 1980)

as though entitled

I struck through the word only because it seemed a bit too pleased and comfortable in its place.

landscape cloak

The title of Zanzotto’s first collection, Dietro il paesaggio, indicates what has become an enduring desire to indeed go behind the landscape, into it, and out upon it, to literally wrap it around the self—as is expressed in the closing lines of the poem “Ormai” (By Now), in which the landscape is conceived of as a type of protecting cloak: “Here all that’s left is to wrap the landscape around the self / and turn your back.” Zanzotto’s recognition of the total encirclement of the self by one’s surroundings reveals a deep rootedness, at once warmly familiar and yet also uneasily enclosing.

—Patrick Barron, introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (U. of Chicago Press, 2007), edited and translated by Patrick Barron.

simple place

His hermitage…looked much the same as Merton left it, we were told. The back room held a narrow bed and a small stack of books, with three cassocks hanging in an alcove. The kitchen, which is only a wide place in the hall, held a sink, hot-plate, small refrigerator, and the only framed item in the place—a certificate from the Vatican conferring upon him the designation “Hermit.” His front room held the writing table, bookcase, rocking chair, and those large unadorned windows with the generous view of the woods and the cart-path meandering into the distance.

—Frederick Smock, Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton (Broadstone Books, 2007), p. 27