thoughtful poem

One of those I-think-this-I-think-that poems.

feel this

Art on that borderline of kitsch: Are you not a feeling human being? Are you not a thinking human being?

mind pain

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

public property

What else are poetry and thinking than someone making his own life into public property, into a life which everyone else can live and enjoy as their own too, making his essence into directly beholdable objects of not only himself, but also of others?

—Ludwig Feurbach, Abelard and Heloise, or: The Writer and the Human (Gegensatz Press, 2012), translated with introduction by Eric v. d. Luft, with a foreword by Angela Moreira.

hard to walk the talk

Often it's the case that the poetry is overmatched when put up against the poet’s prose thinking about poetry.

mental matter

To a conceptualist it’s not about the act/art; it’s about the thinking about the act/art.

materially mired

The poem that was too much thinking about language and not enough thinking through language.

stop thinking about poetry

For some time now I’ve had a nagging suspicion that I would be a better poet if I could stop thinking about poetry.

thinking and remembering

One definition of poetic power is that it so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes. Can a poem, of authentic strength, be composed without remembering a prior poem, whether by the self or by another? Literary thinking relies upon literary memory…

—Harold Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry (HarperCollins, 2004)