locates in space

Like a bat, the poem echolocates in space.

diorama poem

The poem as diorama: a miniature curated space that you can peer into and into which you can pretend for a while to dwell.

mess up the space

A poet who liked to mess up the page with broken sentences and floating words and phrases.

not safe

The poetry workshop should not be a safe space. They’re talking about your poem, not you.

thousand yard stare

You can recognize a writer by the way s/he stares off into space.

bottomless feeling

In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of association) increases the excitement of the poetry.
[…]
We often feel elation when reading Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake because the poet is following some arc of association that corresponds to the inner life of objects he or she speaks of, for example, the association between lids of eyes and the bark of stones [de Nerval’s poem "Golden Lines"]. The associative paths are not private to the poet, but are somehow inherent in the universe.
[…]
The poet who is “leaping” makes a jump from an object soaked in conscious psychic substance to an object soaked in latent or instinctive psychic substance. One real joy of poetry—not the only one—is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

—Robert Bly, “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (Harper & Row, 1990)

bridges in space

The lines were bridges over
the emptiness on each side.

bad architecture

The poem stood like bad architecture filling the space of the page.

polyhedron box

The ‘box’ we call poetry is a polyhedron still building out new spaces.

resource management

A poet prone to waste a lot of white space.

bottom drops out

Until it’s too late, a reader can’t be certain that a space or a pause in the poem is not an abyss.

standing alone

The poem was made of single line/sentence stanzas, each of which called too much attention to itself, standing self-importantly in open space.

green space

A nature poem good enough to be named a state park or protected green space.

hung in space and silence

     My own notion of a poetry reading is quite different. I want the poet to talk about his poems as little as possible, and not so much about the poems as about something one step removed. The voice in which he does his talking unfortunately is the same voice the poor poems must borrow. The more we hear him the less we may be able to hear them.
     I should like poems hung, one at a time, like Japanese pictures, on the exquisite air, each poem surrounded by space and silence.

—Robert Francis, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry (U. of Massachusetts Press, 1968).

attempts to revisit

To revise one attempts to revisit the original psychic space of the piece’s composition.

extra punctuation

Poetry, as opposed to prose, has two additional means of punctuation: the line break and the space.

wasting silence

I’ve heard it said that ‘architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully’. I don’t know who to attribute that remark to; though it may be a misquote of something Philip Johnson once said. In any case, it’s a wry remark and it makes me think that “Poetry is the art of wasting silence (or its material manifestation: the blank page) beautifully."

resonant space

I have chosen the second path, the path of encounter between inner and outer. What is important in this kind of art is to limit the parts of the work I make, accept the parts I do not make, and create a dynamic relationship in which these aspects both interpenetrate and repel each other. I hope that this relationship will lead to the opening up of a poetic, critical, and transcendent space.

I call this art yohaku—emptiness (resonant space).

What I mean by yohaku is not simply the space that is left vacant in the paintings of many painters. Such a space is lacking in reality. For example, if a drum is struck, the sound reverberates into empty space. The space of this vibration, including the drum, is what I call yohaku.

—Lee Ufan, “Yohaku—Emptiness,” The Art of Encounter (Lisson Gallery, 2004)

[Marking Infinity exhibit at the Guggenheim.]

shooting blanks

                       Sometimes
you can’t      make
        it      more of
a poem      just by adding      space

impact image

An image that aggressively rearranges the space of human experience.