between sense and nonsense

It is clear that the poem [Kubla Khan] does not make sense. It would be impossible, for example, to draw a map of the pleasure dome, though many have tried. A ‘chasm’ that slants down a green hill ‘athwart a cedarn cover’ is hard to visualise. On the other hand, the poem does make sense to the extent that it is composed of sentences that work grammatically. It is not a collection of random words assembled by free association, as the work of the French Symbolist poets at times seems to be. Coleridge was a profoundly learned thinker and critic as well as a poet, and in ‘Kubla Khan’ he has discovered the space between sense and nonsense where great poetry lies.

—John Carey, 100 Poets: A Little Anthology (Yale U. Press, 2021)

quote from the blue

With quoted entries ranging from the obscure to the random, it was an ‘uncommonplace book’.

cross purposes

When the narrative intersects with the random.

flipping past

A cavalcade of disparate images: You have entered the age when poets have grown up not with a pen, but with a TV remote control in their hands.

not random

It’s not so much that you need to understand the poem but more a matter of believing that the reading experience is not intended to be random.

breeze of surprise

     There are so many ways to go, the detectives know, opposition and conflict, theories drifting over and beyond one another. Things changed by the act of observation. The old laws of physics. Speed and position. Time and distance.
     They will comb through images, looking for any random detail, the breeze of surprise, a clue. The more obscure the moment, the more valuable the knowledge. There is always a chance they will spot something they already overlooked.
     They work in much the same way as poets: the search for a random word, at the right instance, making the poem itself much more precise.

—Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

bird nest

She built her poem as a bird builds its nest, with strands of this & that found at large in the world.

entropic poetics

It starts with those arbitrary and disassociative sequences which turn to random fragments; randomness leads to entropy, and entropy to boredom.

random acts of poetry

When he got back to his parked car, he thought he’d been given a ticket, but someone had stuck a poem under one of the wiperblades.

sea wrack

The tideline on a beach as model for a line of poetry.

a new york school poet

A New York School poet seems convinced his random musings and casual observations are more interesting than your (the reader's) stray thoughts, sightings and overhearings.