flip-turn

A prose poet should meet the margin with same energy as a competitive swimmer’s flip-turn, pushing off the pool wall.

come up for air

In poetry the right margin is not like in a swimming pool, where the swimmer must make a turn against a wall. The line ends where the swimmer in open water comes up for air.

tooth and nail

An artist and a writer lived together harmoniously while their books and artwork battled for every inch of wall space.

melting into wall

The fate of the painting was, over time and by inattention, to become part of the wall upon which it was hung.

decorative library

The hotel lobby had many bookshelves but the books were turned so that the spines were facing in, facing the wall, as though their titles and authors mattered not, and their purpose was merely decorative like any wall covering.

carriage return

Old enough to remember the manual typewriter and the sound of the carriage return bar, throwing the line back against the wall of the left margin, where it would once more have to fight its way forward.

sounds not chosen

If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen...

—Wallace Stevens, "The Creations of Sound"

Tonight was the Twentieth Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at the Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Lisa Goldfarb's talk was entitled Accents, Syllables, and Sounds: How Wallace Stevens Transforms Us into Musical Readers.

wall words

Once a poem becomes a broadside it can’t hide within the pages of a book.

flip turn

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

load-bearing wall

Think of each line as a load-bearing wall: If the wrong one is broken through during revision, the whole structure of the poem collapses.