waist deep in the river

Writing is like wading waist deep into a river, noticing the trees on the far bank, the swallows catching light as they dive and turn over the surface, while what you should be writing about is down in the murk, the flow of the slow current, the catfish and carp moving along the bottom.

got the once-over

Nothing worse could be said of a poem than it was all artifice and surface.

polished away

When craft is pressed to an extreme that gleam that was the thing’s original light becomes a sheen

neutral surface

Paper as support, its own materiality is usually ignored. So the sense of a neutral surface that can accommodate any mark seems an ideal way of communicating freedom. At the same time printed material has the capacity to repeat itself endlessly and linked to distribution or manifestos—even freedom however idiosyncratic and inscrutable. And this tension is what surfaces and transforms the amnesia of the paper into a tension between the drawn and the printed. The mark and the letter.

—Ellen Gallagher, interview by Jessica Morgan (Institute of Contemporary Art in association with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2001)

under the hull

Reading a beautiful but obscure poem, like gliding over a shimmery surface trying to read the weeds swaying in the currents below.

long cast

The long line cast as though by a fly rod over the stream at a shimmer or shadow just under the surface.

violates the superficial

Daniel Halpern, in his introduction to Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment, offers three criteria for visionary poems: “First, they must honor their language (oral or written), whether it be English, French, German, Kashmiri, Hindi, Sanskrit, or Persian, acknowledging Santayana’s observation that ‘the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods.’ Second, the poems must fulfill, with unerring precision, the requirements of their form, whatever that form turns out to be. And third, the poetry must operate in a visionary realm—that is, present a view of the world that violates the superficial, reaches through the surface to touch the primal material. Wordsworth would call this act the seeing into the life of things; Ruskin wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way…To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, The Hide-And-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013)

haunted importantly

I suppose there is something in my Scottish blood which distrusts the Baroque, feeling there is something vaguely dishonest in using structural devices for decorative purposes. But it is more importantly true that my reservations are because it is an approach that dotes on the surface—whereas my chief interest is focused on the interior of things. I enjoy surfaces, I delight in Italy, I find great pleasure in Veronese, but the Rembrandt self-portraits are far, far more important to me. As the Giotto Madonnas are more valuable than those of Raphael. I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.

Jack Gilbert, “Real Nouns,” 19 American Poets of the Golden Gate (Harcourt Brace, 1984)

[Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert released this week.]

the sublime ratio

When evaluating art, try to measure the ratio of surface to essence. The lower the value the better the art.