remembered poems

Poets make poems but readers make remembered poems.

inspired reader

A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized—or at least everyone recognizes his own poet—by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.

—Paul Valéry, “Poetry of Abstract Thought” (1939), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 (Wesleyan U. Press, 2004), edited by Melissa Kwasny

is quantum

Language is quantum: changing states when observed (by reader or hearer).

reading late

As a reader, late in life, it sometimes makes me sad that I hadn’t encountered a book twenty years before or, better would have been, by the age of twenty.

what is this

At first the reader didn’t recognize the text as a poem.

responsible reader

It’s not all on the writer—the reader too has responsibilities to the text.

course and not conclusion

Lead you readers forward but let them draw their own conclusions.

fussy too much

There is such a thing as fussy revision that matters not when it comes to the reader's experience.

where it's going

The poet may know, but the reader shouldn’t know where the poem is going or where it will come out.

party crasher

Reader as party crasher: He liked it when the start of a poem was somewhat uninviting.

passage lodged

We call them ‘passages’ in literature yet some lodge themselves inside of us for the remainder of our lives.

write this with me

To write a poem that invites the reader into its composition.

literary props

His was a house stager’s library.

dancer, follow my lead

The poem should always be asking the reader to step up.

authoritative line

[One point from a list of 14 principles of composition, which he prefaces by saying, "I honestly do not know how consistent I am in using principles of composition. Certainly the compromise between eye and ear is not always the same kind of compromise. Every poem makes its own peculiar demands. Still, I will try to list a few principles by which I generally work."]

11. Don’t explain away a line which has an authority of its own, even if the line may puzzle the intellect—i.e., don’t write for people more interested in understanding a poem than experiencing it. This is not the same as being willfully difficult or obscure, which is merely tiresome.

—Peter Klappert, in “O’Connor The Bad Traveler,” Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (Longman, 1977), edited by Alberta T. Turner

annotations mon ami

From the margin notes in the used book he was reading he recognized a kindred reader.

dog-ear bookmark

The dog-eared page could mark an important passage, a run of words to return to, or it could mean a stopping place, when then where the book was closed, set aside and never opened again.

shooting script

Poem as script to be enacted by the reader.

lightly read

It was the kind of publication that had no readers except for those contributors who bothered to read their own work upon publication, checking the piece for typos.

end and beginning

As I closed the book I sensed that a face turned from me to drift toward another reader.