prose poem test

The prose poem is the true test of a poem: Could the piece be unlineated and still be a good poem.

limit test

A sonnet is a poem testing the limits of fourteen lines.

bear with me

I think the poet decided to write a very long poem to test who among his readers were beyond discouragement.

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.

one hundred

If you can’t name one hundred poets, then you can’t say you have even partial knowledge of contemporary poetry.

poem-eating contest

Nothing wrong with preferring bite-sized poetry, but you must test the limits of your appetite from time to time with long poems.

mind pain

As when reading an article on the latest subatomic theory, a good poem should hurt your brain.

smell test

The anthology smelled of solicited work.

test for poetry

Will the poem follow you? Will the poem affix itself to you? Will the poem inflect the course of your life?

little to unlearn

[Basil Bunting’s] reading (meaning here his perusal of books) was not uncommonly wide, it was even more uncommonly exact and readily recalled. Always intense and personal his response to any writing was determined by the pleasure and interest it afford him. The absence of this factor makes the academic study of literature a hollow sham, its presence a test of character and truthfulness. Bunting’s taste was formed early: he had a lot to discover but little to unlearn. His revaluation of the canon was more radical than Pound’s and less erratic.

—Kenneth Cox, “Basil Bunting,” The Art of Language: Selected Essays by Kenneth Cox (Flood Editions, 2016), edited and introduced by Jenny Penberthy.

infallible test

In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 22

put to the test

Sartre, for example, wrote that I was the magus of phenomenology! I was delighted. It is true that I am sensitive to things, as Husserl says it—to things in themselves—but if I reacted that way, and a new school of young writers was needed to put this in its proper focus, in order for this to be partly understood today, if I confronted language with something neutral, something which had neither feelings nor ideas, I was doing it for man. If I placed language in front of something neutral, something which is not in itself poetic, it was simply to put it to the test. As simple as that…of course, I am sensitive to things, that’s clear, but I believe that in order to be a writer or any sort of artist, in any discipline, one has got to be sensitive to the exterior world, but also, and as much, one has got to be sensitive to the means of expression. My means of expression is language, and words the way they are; with their existence and their history, their semantical representation. And it is order to revitalize language that I place myself before something neutral, which is not yet poetical in it itself…

—Francis Ponge, in an 1972 interview, Francis Ponge: The Sun Placed in the Abyss (Sun, 1977), interview and translation by Serge Gavronsky.

broken beauty

A test for beauty: Could it be beautiful broken into pieces…or fallen into a state of ruin?

perfect circle, perfect couplet

If in poetry there was an analog to Vasari’s story about Giotto’s perfect circle, would it be the ability to compose a perfect pentameter couplet as epigram on any given subject? ("Perfetto come la 'O' di Giotto", the Italian meaning: "As perfect as Giotto's circle".)

skin deep

A test for a line of poetry: Could you live with these words as a tattoo?

different standards

It was a poem manufactured to meet precise critical standards; thus it failed the test of art.

test drive

He took his new poem for a test drive at the local open mike.

poem's test

Test for a poem: No words needed to introduce it and none would help explain it.