right wrong word

The word you worry about using may be the one that makes the poem work. Turns out it is the right wrong word.

It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place.

—Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order (1956), trans. by Rollo H. Myers, 153.

afraid of having said

You have a right to write about nothing, as I have a right to skip reading what you’ve written.

when it all fits

Strange—we are always inhabiting more than one realm of existence—but they all fit in if the art is right.

—Lorine Niedecker, in a letter to Cid Corman, quoted in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place edited by Elizabeth Willis.

new poetics

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.

—Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

approximal readings

No one knew what the poem was about. But each reading was about right.

uneven ends

The ragged right edge of the poem is reminder of our art’s imperfection.