chance meeting

Always a pleasure to encounter a secret lover of poetry.

weeds

Milkweed

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At the touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.

—James Wright

on the down low

Let’s keep poetry our secret. Otherwise the culture will only ruin it for us.

poetry third

The secret of being a great poet lies in having an abiding interest in the world and in humankind, and not in one’s attention to poetry.

best unkept secret

Richard Howard, in an open address, criticized the establishment of National Poetry Month as a betrayal of “the best kept secret of all”—poetry. Every April, since the establishment of National Poetry Month, I receive a call from my local library or high school, asking if I will participate in a reading. How about November? I always ask, and the answer is always the same: People aren’t interested then; April is the month poetry goes public.

April is the cruelest month.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

—Mary Ruefle, “On Secrets,” Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)

closely held

A poem of one's own: its only reader the one who composed it.

find it free

Free for the taking, the delight in reading a good poem that one knows only a handful of other people know exists in print.

modest and secret complexity

The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologue,” The Self and The Other (1964)

I want to be left alone

Like Garbo, it's only the famous poet who wants to be left alone, who thinks poetry should be hiding itself in some secret bower where only the initiated need know where to find it.