hardly a trail

A poem may reveal almost nothing of its path: a broken twig, a stone disturbed, with little else to follow.

stone room

A stanza that is a room made of stone.

work in stone

The mason stirs:
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.

—Basil Bunting, “Briggflatts,” The Poems of Basil Bunting (Faber & Faber, 2016), edited by Don Share.

stone steps

When reading a poem I want to feel as though I’m coming down stone steps, with some grand edifice at my back.

mark making

Stone, paper, pixels, air, mind…poems will try to fix upon anything

fitted lines

Like in a New England stone wall, the rough edges of words will be what makes them fit together.

go at it like that

Like words gouged into stone with fingernails.

standing stone

The poem as standing stone amid the open field.

marble statue

Each of these new poems stands and prevails as a marble statue, a pure form in itself, delineated on all sides and locked into its own permanent contours, as the soul is locked into its mortal body. These poems—I shall only refer to the “Panther” and the “Carousel”—are carved out of the clumsy cold stone of their daylight brightness, like clear cameos, transparent only to the eye of the mind—structures of piercing hardness unknown heretofore in the German Lyric, the victory of knowing objectivity over the mere idea, the triumph, the ultimate triumph of language turned into total plasticity. Every single object stands there in its own immovable gravity...

—Stefan Zweig, Farewell to Rilke (Friends of the Daniel Reed Library, State University College, Fredonia NY, 1975), translated by Marion Sonnenfeld.

[Rainer Maria Rilke fans should scare up a copy of this pamphlet. It’s hagiography but of the highest form. Stefan Zweig is a beautiful prose stylist, and this was his memorial oration for Rilke delivered in Munich in 1927.]

stepping stone

Each book a stepping stone to another.