line tuckered out

In his [essay] “Not About Julian Schnabel,” [Rene] Ricard wrote about the kind of line that “just gets tuckered out after a while,” adding, “The beautiful charcoal smudges and style we can follow from Matisse through de Kooning to Rivers, Serra, and, in its ultimate decadence, to Susan Rothenberg are perfect illustrations.” He went on, “Judy Rifka told me that when she was in art school all her teachers drew that way. That was the way you were taught, and no matter how lousy the drawing was, it always looked pretty good, like art.” The conventional bohemianism that Ricard embodies may be going the way of the art line he so tellingly describes.

—Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

not less or more

If Woolf is your source text, your erasure poem can't go wrong: Every word in the text was well tested before you came along with your eraser.

broken thing

In poetry, sometimes a sentence is too much, and only a fragment will do.

tight spot

Photographs are often cropped for better effect, and likewise poems too should be willing to give up some background in favor of compositional impact.

not the breaking point

For all its effects, the only thing important about the linebreak is that it shouldn’t be where the reader stops reading.

vicarious mastery

In practice there may be in the making of literature a great deal of one or another kind of technique, whether apparently superficial and formalistic or apparently substantial or ideological, and this technique may be deliberate or habitual or traditional. On the other hand, there may be apparently very little technique. It is never possible, in the given case, to say even roughly how much or what kinds or combinations of kinds of technique were employed until after long intimacy and absorption of the work has, by vicarious mastery, made the question artificial; for the we use the work as use other actual experience.

—R. P. Blackmur, “Notes on Four Categories in Criticism,” The Lion and the Honeycomb: Essays in Solicitude and Critique (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.

near eye

At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account.

The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific.

—George E. Woodberry, "A New Defence of Poetry," Heart of Man, and Other Papers (Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920)

grudge match

Craft vs. Grit.

noun as adjective

Using a noun as an adjective to good effect. [Thinking Dylan Thomas]

working into my own, unknown

The first seven drawings are from a group that I made in 1915-1916 when I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel and oil. The use of my materials wasn’t a problem for me. But what to say with them? I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught—not like what I had seen—shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

kept his plates fair

We Followers saw things from Whistler’s standpoint. If he etched a plate, we had to etch it almost exactly on Whistlerian lines. If Whistler kept his plates fair, ours were so fair that they could scarcely be seen. If Whistler adopted economy of means using the fewest possible lines, we became so nervous that we could scarcely touch the plate lest we should overelaborate.

—Mortimer Menpes, Whistler As I Knew Him (Hol Arts Book, 2009)

blank look

In this poem the blank spaces are just empty space.

shooting blanks

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

linebreak ache

Linebreak ache: experiencing a poet execute one of those overly clever linebreaks meant to call maximum attention to syntactic meaning or a word within a word.

shouting

The slam poet apparently thought shouting was a poetic technique.

voice and style

'Voice', as an attribute, is often ridiculed because it is mistaken for a poetic technique. But voice is nothing more than style inflected by one's favored themes and subject matter. And not unlike the word 'style', voice is used too often and used in place of the hard work of describing the characteristics of the writing under consideration.