late to realize

Unfortunately as poets we must realize that revision is the real writing.

physical response

I think it’s that combustible interaction between the arbitrary imagination and the real that produces Dickinson’s physical response, a sensation I myself have had, once on a plane after reading the first pages of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s book-length poem, Alphabet. Reading those first few lines, I felt a fizzy, rushing heat rise from my stomach to my throat. I couldn’t wait to read the next page, and the next, and the next. It also made me want to re-create this experience in words for myself.

Another way of saying it: I know I’m in the presence of poetry when I, too, want to write it.

—Paisley Rekdal, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Forensically (Norton, 2024)

real struggle

The imagination as nemesis.

things or signs

Her nouns were real things. Her nouns were signs.

obscure grasping

The poetry that comes into being as a result of the working of the creative intuition upon poetic knowledge therefore reveals both an “obscure grasping of the real” and “an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet.” Maritain calls the former the “direct” sign of a poetic act and the latter a “reverse” sign of the same act. Both signs are inextricably involved in the making of a poem.

For if at the source of the poetic act there is the experience which I have tried to describe, in which the obscure grasping of the real, resounding in the creative subjectivity, is at the same time an obscure grasping of the soul of the poet, it will be necessary that the work be made a manifestation of both at once. This work is an object, and must always maintain its consistency and its proper value as an object, and at the same time it is a sign, at once a “direct” sign of the secrets perceived in things, of their avowal, of some irrecusable verity of their nature or history, transpierced by the creative intuition, and a “reverse” sign of the substance of the poet in the art of spiritual communication and revealing itself to itself. [Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry(Philosophical Library, 1955), p 84]

Samuel Hazo, The World within the Word: Maritain and the Poet (Franciscan U. Press, 2018)

JF: I wanted to like the book more than I did. So much muzzy metaphysics in Maritain’s poetics. Ample amounts of Maritain are quoted, full of abstract words and concepts, presented as though self-evident, but Maritain offers almost no textual evidence to buttress his assertions. Hazo provides many quotes from other authors to try to underpin Maritain’s bold but unfounded ideas. I give Hazo credit for linking Keats and Hopkins to some of Maritain’s ideas. However, the two poets, and their notions of ‘poetics’, prove to be more relevant to the creative process than any of Maritain’s grand notions.   

false dualities

Beware nevertheless of false dualities: classical and romantic, real and ideal, reason and instinct, mind and matter, male and female—all should be merged into each other (as a Taoists merged their Yin and Yang in the Tao) and should be regarded as two aspects of one idea. […]

Yet ridiculous as may seem the dualities in conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Persea Press, 1981; first published in Curwen Press in 1944)

close encounters

In poetry there is almost no distinction between the real and the paranormal.

safe harbor

Tired of pobiz, I turn to Thomas Merton.

[Thomas Merton lectures].

refuge for the real

Poetry as the last refuge for those still possessed with a feeling for what is real.

en plein air

A nature poem in which you could see sky behind the text.

stay with it

To reveal the mystery within the real without resorting to metaphor.

rewritten in realtime

I woke from the dream of the poem and rewrote it in language of the real.

closer to real

Surrealism gathers strength when it hews closest to the real.

plain sight

Plain sight is poetry because real seeing is such a rare phenomenon.

what is not seen

The image owes neither its principle nor its power to what is visually given. To justify the poet’s conviction and the image’s frequency and naturalness, we must integrate with it those constituents that we do not see, and whose nature is not visual. They are in fact those by which material imagination is made manifest. Only a psychology of the material imagination could explain this image in its real totality, in its real life.

—Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et le rêves

(translated by Jean-Claude Margolin, in Bachelard’s Philosophy and Poetics, 1989, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America)

banish muse and daimon

Banish both the muse and daimon. Let inspiration arise solely from the real.

living in poetry

That’s what I shall call living in poetry: prolonging the real not by the fantastic, the marvelous, images of paradise, but by trying to live what is concrete in its true dimension, living one’s daily life in what one might call, perhaps, the epic of the real.

To define the verb to live would be a whole philosophy. And nothing at all.

We can amuse ourselves defining poetry, but we do not define sensations.

—Guillevic
Living in Poetry: Interviews with Guillevic,translated from the French by Maureen Smith(The Dedalus Press, 1999) p. 11