plain and floral

The book’s poems were rather plain, while the book’s blurbs were beyond florid.

to see clearly

…the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion—all in one.

—John Ruskin, “Of Modern Landscape”

word order

In Gertrude Stein’s writing the words are rather plain and generic while the rhetoric is particular when it’s not peculiar.

not common literary property

I get so pissed-off at the plain-talk people—who claim that Whitman wrote street talk and that William Carlos Williams let it all hang out—that I forget the beautiful art of simplicity. When I read a stretch of short, simple, powerful things by Jack Gilbert, I remember how utterly moving plainness can be: “Divorce”:

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.

Stopped, remembering. Stood looking

out at the bright moonlight on concrete.

Everything is there: exact adequacy, intelligence that withholds comment, and the luck (or vision) of the natural symbol. There is also that invaluable thing—with luck you hit on it fives times in fifty years of writing—when you say something that everyone has experienced (waking up feeling, not knowing why) which is not common literary property.

—Donald Hall, The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts form Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets (W.W. Norton, 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss.

coat peg

The first line wasn’t special; more like a coat peg, just something to hang the poem on.

plain wrapper

A publisher who was trying to bring back the boring book cover.

[Thinking of Wave Books]

impossible and plain

Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.

—Susan Howe, "Scare Quotes II," The Midnight (New Directions, 2003)

that stance

Too personal, too political, too plain…I loved—and love—his [Etheridge Knight’s] work because of the overwhelming passion, the variety of form, and the exact appropriateness of the language. I almost didn’t realize the nervousness, the “calm hysteria” of the poems, their unity of voice, and their overwhelming political stance. It’s almost as if the poet—and his poems—were so grounded, so authentic, that I took that stance for granted. Thus spoke Etheridge; thus was Etheridge. I almost took for granted the magnificent art.

—Gerald Stern, “Etheridge Knight,” Stealing History (Trinity Univ. Press, 2012)