veil of artifice

A formalist who hides his lack of poetic verve behind a scrim of crafted verse. He doesn’t have the nerve to leave the verse behind.

admired if not loved

Alexander Pope is not a poet one loves. But Pope lives on by quotable verse that sings and stings.

poet of a certain age

If you call poetry ‘verse’ you immediately mark yourself as retrograde.

blind curve

Though dangerous when driving, a blind curve is sought after when writing/reading a line of verse.

no turning point

Prose poet: one whose lines run but won’t turn.

pressed flowers

The flowers were more preserved than the pages of verse in which they were pressed.

slows it down

One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.

—Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (Counterpoint, 1983)

he walks the line

The old verse poet kept iambling along.

definitely averse

A line that won’t be turned easily.

straight line

Aphorism: a verse that won’t be turned.

verse tweezers

A couplet: verse tweezers used to present an image or a thought held in its squeeze of rhyme.

flip turn

Constraint of the verse line: With each flip-turn, a swimmer gains power pushing off from the pool wall.

house slippers

The lines padded along in soft iambs as though written in house slippers.

end of the line

The end of each line or verse (the turning) allows for a resonance to fill the brief pause and also opens the line up to a moment’s reflection.