algebraic lyric

The lyric poem as an expression, an equation or an inequation (borrowing terms from algebra). As an expression, the lyric poem is a gesture, a stance, an outcry, without any particular shape or resolution. As an equation, the lyric becomes fully formed, taking shape and resolving itself. As inequation, the lyric grasps about but finds no shape or resolution in its utterance.

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
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I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
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If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
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I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
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Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
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Books are made out of books.
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Language is always an abbreviation.
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The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
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When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
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Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
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Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
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The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
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A poem is just a shape.
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The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

etch in light

There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

—Diane di Prima, from "Rant"

ideal flower

In [Mallarmé's] preface to René Ghil’s Traité du Verbe (Treatise on the Word, 1886), he said that his aim was to perceive, beyond a real flower, the ideal flower that can never be found in this world: “Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets” (I say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion into which my voice consigns any real shape, as something other than petals known to man, there rises, harmoniously and gently, the ideal flower itself, the one that is absent from all earthly bouquets).

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephane-mallarme

by your hands

Poet, don’t accept the form, shape it.

made statement

Even the shape of the poem had some swagger.

shapely fountain

Yeats said that he wrote in form because if he didn’t he wouldn’t know when to stop. Like Samuel Beckett I prefer the word ‘shape’ to ‘form.’ At Trinity [College Dublin] during a course on Aristotle’s Poetics our Greek professor W. B. Stanford told us to come back the following week with our own definition of poetry. Mine was: ‘If prose is a river, then poetry’s a fountain.’ I still feel that’s pretty good because it suggests that ‘form’ (or ‘shape’) is releasing rather than constraining. The fountain is shapely and at the same time free-flowing.

—Michael Longley, “A Jovial Hullabaloo,” One Wide Expanse (The Poet's Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, University College Dublin Press, 2015)

uneven ends

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

shapely figure

Just the shape of a poem on the page has an attractiveness prose cannot match.

didactic art

All good art is didactic. In that good art moves us or it makes us think, and thus it shapes our lives. Bad art is art without influence over its intended audience.

accident prone

One should not be afraid of accidents occurring in one’s art as accidents happen only to those who are engaged in accidents. (103)

=

Composition is a design personified, a design not mechanically perfect but emotionally perfect. A design is of an evocative nature. Design that is magic. In a perfect composition shapes excluded and shapes included are equally important. (104)

—John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1971), annotated from unpublished writings and critical introduction by Marcia Epstein Allentuck.

window blinds

Most poems are windows, though the text sometimes blocks the view.

closed to some

So many poems are shaped like doors; and some really are.

brick shithouse

A rock-solid block of words.