many things at once

A poet can hold many things at one time inside the head.

bootleg and spatchcock

And here is the main difficulty that imagism and its derivatives and variations run into every time. Most ideas are not contained in the mere names of things, nor even in the description of things, and have to be supplied from elsewhere. If you are and say you are in principle against any ideas save such as come packaged in things and the names of things, you will have to bootleg your ideas in somehow-anyhow and spatchcock them onto your poem somehow-anyway, while continuing to proclaim you are doing no such thing.

—Howard Nemerov, “Image and Metaphor,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

inch by inch

So aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are. America inch by inch. This has nothing to do with evaluation or usefulness.

—Fairfield Porter, “Letters to Claire and Robert White.” Parenthèse, No. 4, 212.

[Quoted in Douglas Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT (U. of Michigan, 1996)]

you stumble on them

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

—Novalis
Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things. - Blüthenstaub (1798).

things or signs

Her nouns were real things. Her nouns were signs.

things about

The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
the statues will have gone back to be things about.

—Wallace Stevens, from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

[This afternoon was the twenty-fourth annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash. The guest speaker, Langdon Hammer, featured the poem “An Ordinary Evening…” in his talk entitled The Virtual Stevens.]

noticed or resistant to notice

Nothing is beneath notice, though some things resist being recorded.

book of forms

All the world, things immense and small, things static and moving, are possible models for the poem.

make mountainous

For hours and days on end he [Cézanne] sought out ways to make unintelligible the obvious, and to find for things easily understood an inexplicable basis. As time went by, a secret watchfulness settled in his eyes from so much precise circling of contours that became for him edges of a mystery. An entire quiet lifetime he spent fighting inaudibly and, one might be tempted to say, with nobility, to make mountainous—if such a paraphrase might suffice—the frame of things.

—Robert Walser, “A Discussion of a Picture,” Looking at Pictures (Christine Burgin/New Directions, 2015), translated by Lydia Davis.

begin in wonder

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us that through wonder (thaumazein) “people both now begin and in the first began to philosophize.” Earlier, in Plato’s Theaetatus we learn that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.” Both poetry and philosophy intersect in their desire for the essence or source of things.

—Mark Irwin, “Poetry and Originality: Have You Been There Before?” The Writer’s Chronicle, Vol. 48, Number 2, Oct./Nov. 2015

human things

For our ancestors, a house, a fountain, even clothing, a coat, was much more intimate. Each thing, almost, was a vessel in which what was human found and defined itself.

Now, from America, empty, indifferent things sweep in—pretend things, life-traps…A house, in the American sense, an American apple, a grapevine, bears no relation to the hope and contemplation which our ancestors informed and beheld them.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Witold Hulewicz, Nov. 13, 1925, quoted in A Year With Rilke (Harper Collins, 2009), translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

these words

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

Revelation 21:5, King James Version

it's all in there

The poem as a cabinet of curiosities.

found objects

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.

—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)

objects at rest

     It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic, at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.
     In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.
     Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law and beyond it.

—Pablo Neruda, “Toward an Impure Poetry,” Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 (Grove Press, 1983), translated by Ben Belitt.

who have loved beautiful things

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

―Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Co., 2013)

[The painting: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654)]

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.

not passing through

But the poet does not write chiefly for his own generation; he must therefore write about permanent things, or things that are permanent because they are perpetually renewed, like grass and humanity. The most important part of a poem is the subject; and permanence is the one essential element in the subject of poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, fragment "Preface" to Continent's End

no fifth leg

Emerson loved language as much as any poet does, but he understood that reality is larger than language. If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have? The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one. “All language,” says Emerson in “The Poet,” “is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as horses and ferries are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Emerson did care for language—a great deal—but he always insisted that words do not exist as things in themselves, but stand for things which are finally more real than the words.

—Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (U. of Iowa Press, 2009)

less a thing

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it...Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

—Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Human Condition (1958)