absolute poems

He waited 30 years for that run of poems that were absolute and couldn’t be ignored. All that time he felt them inside himself but they never came forth.

repetitions or rhymes

No wonder that a sensibility so exquisite and so voluminous as that of Proust, filled with endless images and their distant reverberations, could be rescued from distraction only by finding certain repetitions or rhymes in this experience….Thus he required two phenomena to reveal to him one essence, as if essences needed to appear a second time in order to appear at all. A mind less volatile and retentive, but more concentrated and loyal, might easily have discerned the eternal essence in any single momentary fact. It might also have felt the scale of values imposed on things by human nature, and might have been carried towards some by an innate love and away from others by a quick repulsion: something which in Proust is remarkably rare. Yet this very inhumanity and innocent openness, this inclination to be led on by endlessly rambling perception, makes his testimony to the reality of essences all the more remarkable. We could not have asked for a more competent or more unexpected witness to the fact that life as it flows is so much time wasted, and that nothing can ever be recovered or truly possessed save under the form of eternity which is also, as he tell us, the form of art.

—George Santayana, “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz

[The above quote could be applied to the poetry of John Ashbery.]

only a footnote

He wrote the kind of poetry that would never accrete any lasting acclaim but might hang on for a time as a footnote.

old warriors

Time turns the avant garde into the old guard.

heretofore unseen

Whether by wonder or dismay, in that moment of first experiencing the art, no one would be able to recognize the artist’s accomplishment until much later.

epigram for one book

The time I took
to make this book,
being both debut
and long review.

not fade away

Dante has held up well over time. That's what literature is: Writing something that doesn’t fade from consciousness of the cognoscenti.

take a selfie

He had the same author photo for ten years. Doesn’t he know his smartphone has a camera?

reading late

As a reader, late in life, it sometimes makes me sad that I hadn’t encountered a book twenty years before or, better would have been, by the age of twenty.

textus fugit

Lives are fleeting and so are all but a few literary texts.

no time

The best poems are atemporal.

go big or

Sorry, but if you’re not a romantic poet, in time people will pay less attention.

word wait

The poet had waited a long time to use that particular word in a poem.

time running out

He kept waiting for that one great run of poems.

new evaporate

Even if one’s work is new and original, one must ask whether it escapes the ephemeral.

time spent

On the side of critics, often good criticism takes much longer than the original composition.

compressed composition

He found that he could only force poems to happen. And the shorter the time to write the poem, the better.

relative time

At the reading, the poet said he'd dashed off this one, which meant the poem was a decade in the making.

bars not spines

He began to look upon the spines of the unread books as prison bars.

coterminus

A work of art that had no afterlife beyond the death of its creator.