allowed to well up

Poet, allow the music to well up in and around your words.

self-inflicted extinction

Certain words, having an excess of syllables, or being ill-melodious or seeming contrary to their definitions, drive their own extinction within the language. [‘cachinnate’ for example]

no breach

I felt the poet wanted to overwhelm me with words. Good luck.

felt again by language

Sensations fade but words tie us to existence by allowing us to recover the felt aspects of experience.

blotted letters

Clotted with words, it was a blot poem.

words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

weighed down

Poet, let the words weigh heavy.

style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

living things

Another poetic requirement, necessary to emphasize since reading and writing became almost universal throughout the English-speaking area fifty years ago, is that every word must be given its full meaning. In commercial, scientific, and newspaper prose there is an increasing tendency to use words as mere counters, stripping them of their history and force and associations—as one might use a box of old foreign coins in a card game without regard for their date, country, face-value or intrinsic value. The creative side of poetry consists of treating words as if they were living things—in coupling them and making them breed new life.

—Robert Graves, “Preface to a Reading of Poems,” Food for the Centaurs (Doubleday, 1960)

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

the many vs. the few

Spew words versus few words: the dialectic of contemporary poetry.

what words are

The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas, but they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts—just as a melody which, though it may be associated with a conceptual meaning, cannot be described by words or by any other medium of expression. And it is just that irrational quality which stirs up our deepest feelings, elevates our innermost being, and makes it vibrate with others.

The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined therewith. It is stronger than what the words convey objectively—stronger even than reason with all its logic, in which we believe so firmly...

If art can be called the re-creation and formal expression of reality through the medium of human experience, then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art. Each word originally was a focus of energies, in which the transformation of reality into the vibrations of the human voicethe&mash;vital expression of the human soul—took place.

—Lama Angarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (Rider & Co., 1960), no translator given

small change

He was a poet and so he could always dig into his pockets for a few more words.

nothing but

A nothing poem made of nothing but words.

word bather

A poet who bathed in words, and words were nothing to him and everything all at once.

[Thinking of poet Peter Ganick.]

not words alone

Poetry
Forgive me for helping you understand
that you're not made of words alone.

—Rogue Dalton, "Poetic Art" (1974)

world falls silent

No one really likes starlings.
For that reason alone, I continue
to savor them as they dip and dim
and vanish, taking with them
stemma, chrysalis, reticulate, telluric,
umbra, redolence, circumjacence,
and the verb perpend—each one
endangered, nearly extinct, desperate
for a mouth to roost in, for a tongue
that will relish the taste of its consonants
and vowels. What else might a word want?
A mind that respects what words mean.
Enough heart to know that within each
word left unsaid, a lost autochthonous
world falls silent. No assonance,
not even an echo. Each unused word an urn.

—Margaret Gibson, closing of the poem “Elegy, with Murmuration of Starlings,” Connecticut River Review, 2024

unpoetic words

Those words you feel sorry for knowing they’ll never find a way into a poem. Then sometimes you are surprised when such a word shows up in a poem.

[See “tergiversations” from June Jordan’s “Poem for Haruko”]

oed till the end

I happen to own a full-sized set of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was given to me by my wife as a wedding present. Just wow. I don’t go to them as often in this digital age, but I will keep them to the end of my life. If I open my arms I could try to lift them, but the volumes end to end are near a yard wide, and each volume is a foot high, each volume a tome. Word tomb now? It would be like trying to lift sacred stone tablets. I’d be afraid they’d slip from my grip, break apart on the ground, words, words, words, spilling out.

this way

Having a way with words will only get you so far. You must have a way into the world that others will want to follow.