often afraid

17.
Unexpectedly, late one night, a friend leans close to ask me what I want people to say about my poems after I’m gone.

I don’t ask what he means by gone. I dismiss the question. I change the subject, but the question stays with me for days until I come up with an answer.

His poems were fearless, though he was often afraid.

—Derek JG Williams, Poetry is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022)

impossible to answer

Can the emotion I need to express be found in language alone?

after witt

Every line in the poem needn’t be equally understood; some lines you just have to pass over in silence and without question.

the visual or the musical

…whether we should finally compare Pound’s free verse to ancient musical notations, as if it indicated the placement of varying scales, tones, or, on the other hand, compare it to sculpture, as does Donald Davie, seems a question worth asking, though not worth answering. After all, if Pound did not trouble himself to choose either the visual or the musical as modernist poetry’s sister art, I see no reason why readers should have to make the choice on his behalf. Still, by listening to Pound’s Imagist poems (no only reading, analyzing, interpreting, source-hunting), one may hear the music of the twentieth century having “just forced, or forcing itself into words.”

—Alex Shakespeare, “Poetry Which Moves By Its Music,” Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (UNO Press, 2013), edited by John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H.R. Stonback.

it's time

   Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

   Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A Language That Exiles Me,"(boundary 2 / Spring 1999), translated by Pierre Joris

answered in advance

The question posed in the poem was clearly a coy set-up for an answer the poet already possessed.

well-wrought ask

A question must be composed better than a statement.

unsure of its surroundings

Often a poetic line is composed in the form of a statement only to be put down on the page tentatively, as though a question.

freedom of information act

As readers we may ask on what, and how many, levels are we allowed to engage this poem. We won’t always get an answer, but we get to ask.