worry word

Poet, keep that worry word.

one pure word

One pure word could cure this poem.

word well

For a poet, each word is a well: dark, deep, full of echoes, and the faint reflection of water.

plural difference

Its plural form can change a word quite a lot.

poor word choice

One word ruined the whole poem.

higher order word

The word finds its apotheosis in a sentence.

personal music

I learned, from Edwin [Denby], that each phrase was an object and that word order was plastic; that each word used all of its space and so had to fill it; that each line floated as well as connected; and that where a sentence stopped and another began was ambiguous, like in speech. I learned that one could place personal suffering in a context that might be communal as of persons or communal as of objects and actions and words—either one worked as community. I thus learned a scale one was being along that began with oneself and others in one’s apartment and proceeded out onto the street and into the imaginary space of painting and ballet on up into the sky above tall buildings, all inside one and one inside it. I learned not to fear the sound of personal peculiarities in poetry, personal “music,” that that’s what the poems would finally be made of.

—Alice Notley, “Intersections with Edwin’s Lines,” Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 (The Song Cave, 2023)

walk for one word

I went out for a walk to find the word I was looking for.

Out for a walk, I have often found the words I was looking for lying about in the landscape, as easy to gather as bending to pick up a stone or reaching up to snap off a dead twig.

word from nowhere

The improbable word that makes possible the whole poem.

three realms

The finest writing is for the voice. There are several good, not to say decisive, reasons for this. No word is a word by itself. Every word is multiple, and not simply because there are homonyms and homophones hanging around, pretending to be friends. A word is made of sounds. A word is made of marks. A word is made of little muscle movements in the throat which accompany our interior speech—that invisible, inaudible, yet clearly heard interior talk of which Samuel Beckett made himself the master. So there are two spoken tongues to set against the one we write. And if we allow the written word to stand for the spoken one, and the silent speech to precede both, then the written word works in three realms at once, not just one.

—William H. Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

gross vehicle weight

No line without one weighted word.

It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place.

—Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order (1956), trans. by Rollo H. Myers, 153.

starting gate

The first line should be like the start of a horse race. Each word, whether calm or jumpy, guided into a stall of the starting gate. Then…the bell rings, and they run.

unpoetic word

I was aware of the word but never conceived of it fitting so well within a poem.

attractive sentences

Attracted by a good sentence, it was hard for her to enjoy lines broken into single words and disconnected phrases and clauses.

word wait

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

words you don't know yet

Many said [in the publishing world] that it was not a children's book. The vocabulary was much too difficult...

"But my feeling was that there is no such thing as a difficult word. There are only words you don't know yet,..."

—Norton Juster, quoted in his obit by Andrew Limbong

spirit word

Isn’t the word ‘poem’ a spirit in the world?

two poles

There are poets who come from the word, and poets who come from the world. Most poets are suspended in that strange and uneasy magnetism between those two poles.

slipped the system

A word that had escaped the care, custody and control of the language.