unmoved to making

I may be interested in a particular practice of making poetry without the least desire to practice that kind of making myself.

predilection and its limits

When it comes to writing, our predilections will inevitably shape our practice, but they should not constrain our purview when it comes to the experience of literature.

clean lines

To me writing haiku is a good exercise. I dig and respect them because they create an image—paint a picture—so precisely. They draw pictures in very clean lines. You say what you want to say symbolically. I work with haiku a lot in my attempt to handle the language—the word. I don’t see haiku as black form, but, then, you utilize whatever modes or vehicles are available to you.

—Etheridge Knight, interview by Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo 19:4 (Fall 1996).

spiritual practice

When he was asked his religion, he answered that he practiced Poetry.

shadow, vibration, whiff...

The word ‘poetry’ is used as an exaltation or as an honorific in many arts. But for its practitioners poetry is just something that haunts the final piece.

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.

take a disliking to

Try to write the kind of poem you’re disinclined to like.

experimental me

One suspects he spends more energy asserting his experimental stance than actually writing anything one would recognize as being outside the pattern and practice of contemporary poetry.

pressure written

Perhaps nothing is worse for a poet than having too much time to write.

ways and means

Though in conversation or a drinking bout, Edmund Smith was always jotting thoughts and images. But he completed little.

[…]

[Christopher] Smart, being in a madhouse and denied writing materials, wrote much of his verse, probably including the Song of David, with a key on the walls of his cell.

[…]

[William] Mickle, being a printer, often composed his verses directly into type without taking the trouble previously to put them into writing.

—Chard Powers Smith, Annals of the Poets (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935)

warm up

Still practicing your scales in those first few lines?

everyone's doing it

Everyone reads fiction but everyone writes poetry.

fantastic, mysterious practices

Extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for attaining higher knowledge. —Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It (Anthroposophic Press, 1947)

Extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for attaining higher poetry.