small door

The door
We go through—
So small.

The rooms
We enter—immense.

—Gregory Orr, The City of Poetry (Sarabande Books, Quarternote Chapbook Series #10. 2012)

radio left on

Most poems will be like a radio left on in a vacant room, a device talking into space.

echo form

Two people walk into a poetry reading late, while the reader is reciting her pantoum. The guy says to his date, 'Gosh, there's a terrible echo in this room'.

write the room

A prose poet knows how to ‘write’ the room.

stone room

A stanza that is a room made of stone.

close reading

Close reading: Trying to be in the room where the poem happened.

room for more

Poems are creatures we put into the world to respond to us, and to whom we, in turn, respond. And marvelously there’s always room for more.

—Irving Feldman, Usable Truths (Waywiser Press, 2019)

from another room

Allusions are the like voices half-heard from adjoining rooms.

secured rooms

When I first heard of blockchain technology, I immediately thought of a strong poem in stanzas.

all art

Little by little, pictures encumbered all the rooms, till only a room or two was left for the purposes of the man who required to eat, sleep, entertain his friends. Little by little the hours in which he was still the man whom he was so well, became rarer. His house was already almost a museum, his flesh and blood little more than the place where a work of art was being accomplished.

—Marcel Proust “Gustave Moreau,” Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919 (Dell Publishing Co., 1964), translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

minimal inventory

Practical Philosophy
     Baruch Spinoza, by profession a lens-grinder, spent the last years of his life in lodgings on the Pavilion Gracht, in the Hague, most of his time in one room, often taking his meals there, and sometimes not leaving it for several days when he was at work on a project. His first biographer listed his final possessions: “The inventory of a true philosopher. Some small books, some engravings, a few lenses and the instruments to polish them.” His desk, containing letters and unpublished works, was sent to his publisher in Amsterdam.
     A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us.

—Susan Howe, “Vagrancy in the Park,” The Quarry (New Directions, 2015).

more room

Stanza means ‘room’, but strive to make each one a great hall or a basilica.

more light

So often in a writer’s photo it’s a wan person holed up in a little room, hunched over a typewriter or keyboard, with a shelf of books where a window should be.

good in a room

The sonnet is the right form for frustrated interior decorators.

many rooms

The poem has many rooms, corridors, and closets.

poetry's one-room schoolhouse

With a degree of sentimentality, we love the sonnet because it is poetry’s one-room schoolhouse.