utilitarian artist

To a certain extent, the artist can be considered the most utilitarian of persons, for he uses even unusable things, he is the one who uses insignificant perceptions and arbitrary acts to invent, outside of a practical interest, a background interest, a secondary necessity. The unique quality of artistic invention is to lend these useless impressions such a value that not only do they become as indispensable as any direct perception, but as they are given to us we feel even more the need to find them again and to enjoy them. This is what Paul Valéry calls the “aesthetic infinite.”

—Maurice Blanchot, “Poetics,” Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford Univ. Press, 2001

brain tattoo

The image was a brain tattoo.

free associative reading

If literary magazines didn’t make payment with copies, who'd ever read them?

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.

emotion inflected

The poem’s impetus is emotion. But all the better when inflected by intellect.

set upon the word herd

The wolves of revision set upon that vast migration of words, to cut out the weak and infirm.

first stumbling efforts

So the enthusiastic praise often lavished on works employing innovatory techniques, new stylistic tricks, novelties of form or medium is misplaced unless these bring, or have the potential to bring, some new aesthetic character of value. In this respect those who inveigh against the cult of the original are right; but equally, those are wrong who decry any extreme stylistic or technical innovation before assessing what is being done with it or what might be, what new worlds of aesthetic experience are opened up. Who could have foreseen the glories to be achieved, faced with the first stumbling efforts in sonnet form or the first essays in pictorial perspective?

—Frank Sibley, “Originality and Value”

condition of Muzak

After Post-Modernism: All Art aspired to a condition of Muzak.

force over nuance

The political poem sacrifices nuance for emotional force.

grail poem

Sometimes he thought he could almost see the faint outlines of that grail poem.

pressure of the contemporaneous

Two nights ago, The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens with the Hartford Public Library had James Longenbach as our guest speaker. His talk was entitled "An Examination of Wallace Stevens in a Time of War." Generally, Longenbach's thesis was that Stevens did care about what was happening around him in the world, and that he used his poetry not as evasion but as way to inflect and to change those impinging circumstances of existence. Longenbach, using the example of the composition of one his own poems, told about how a box of paperclips had been one of the poem's triggering elements. However, Longenbach choose not to make that specific thing an image in the poem. The imagination would not be pinned to that particular reality.

A key quote in the talk was this one from Opus Posthumous:

"The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion."

Stevens goes on to state:

"In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance."

large garden

The poem is a garden planted too large to ever be perfectly kempt.

prototype and finished product

Each poem, once finished, is both prototype and finished product.

trope dope

It's easy for poets to get hooked on that trope dope.

expectation and vulnerability

Imagination is only the expectation of or a vulnerability to the poems all around us.

self-enclosed, self-limiting

A poem presents material so that it becomes a universe in itself…There is something self-enclosed and self-limiting in a poem, and this self-sufficiency is the reason, as well as the harmony and rhythm of sounds, why poetry is, next to music, the most hypnotic of the arts.

—John Dewey, "The Varied Substance Of The Arts," Art As Experience(Perigee/Penguin Putnam Books, 1980)

stratum

Each line is a stratum. As you read down through the poem, the weight of the lines above you can be felt.

lost in performance

Performance tends to enlarge the text to the point that all nuance and detail are lost due to scale.

effigy of alphabetic straw

To read materially is to make the word a crude effigy of alphabetic straw.

poet pirate

Poet, be a swashbuckler on the high seas of language!

of poets and philosophers

To the extent that poetry and philosophy are taken to be mutually exclusive, poetry is viewed as an activity purely of creating or inventing (poiesis, making), philosophy, as an activity purely of learning (mathesis) or seeing (theorein). Poets are taken to be produce, actively, what had not been at all, philosophers to apprehend, passively, what must always be. This is why philosophers have been taken, by some, to have access to the truth; they are supposed merely to take in what they view, not to alter it by viewing.

The opposition between making and learning—and, therefore, the mutual exclusion of poetry and philosophy—is a false one. As for making, no matter how creative the poet, the poem created is conditioned by the poet’s language and experience: the creation is not ex nihilo. It may be less apparent that the philosopher’s learning cannot be a matter of wholly passive receptivity…if it were, the receptivity would not go beyond mute apprehension. As soon as a philosopher begins to speak or to teach, the philosopher begins to make or produce: the philosopher becomes a poet. [p. 8]
…

I do not mean to suggest that no distinction between philosophy and poetry may or should be drawn; I do not mean to suggest that any distinction that would make a writer either a philosopher or a poet is misleading. The best writers, in my judgment—the most interesting, the most illuminating, the most informative, the most aesthetically pleasing—are philosophical poets or poetic philosophers. Nietzsche is among them. [p. 9]

—Alan White, Within Nietzsche’s Labryrinth (Routledge, 1990)

no echo

A word fell off the end of my line, and vanished into a crevasse of white space. The word with which it had rimed called out to it, but no echo could be heard.

synecdoche

The personal and the local are always synecdoche for the universal.

the folds

He handed me his poem and I read it, but what could I say other than that the folds in the paper were the most beautiful and elegant elements of the page. The best lines, so to speak.

shouting

The slam poet apparently thought shouting was a poetic technique.

figurehead from dream

Poetry comes to me from an always latent dream. I like to direct this dream except on days of inspiration when I have the impression that it directs itself

I don’t like a dream which just drifts (I was going to say which just dreams). I try to make a substantial dream of it, a kind of ship’s figurehead which after crossing inner space and time confronts outside space and time—and for it the outside is the blank page

—Jules Supervielle, “Reflections on the Art of Poetry, 1951,” Selected Poems, edited by George Bogen

density is dynamism

Density of language necessarily adds dynamism to the poetry.

fear of heights

With no stanzas below, I felt a slight vertigo atop that tower of text.

petty criminals

The backroom of the bar was a haven for prostitutes and their pimps, con artists, addicts and dealers, poets and other petty criminals.

intellectual luxury good

When poetry is cut off from its social, cultural and political underpinnings, it becomes an intellectual luxury good.

Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

Since the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger has attempted, in certain tracts, to erect a kind of philosophy more myth-like than mystic, in which he enjoins us to a communion with the earth and the world, invoking to this end the thought of Hölderlin and Rilke.

—Jean Wahl, A Short History Of Existentialism (Philosophical Library, 1940)

running scared

The avant garde is always running scared, like the Israelites fleeing not through a parted Red Sea but the Mainstream about to close over them.

and yet undefined

Words organized for affect; often employing the effects of sound, imagery and metaphor through compressed expressions marked by their nuance or unusual perspective.

metaphor's category error

The metaphor flaunts its ‘category error’.

banish muse and daimon

Banish both the muse and daimon. Let inspiration arise solely from the real.

not the language of the age

The language of the age is never the language of poetry.

—Thomas Gray (1716-1771), in a letter to Richard West, 8 April 1742

elephant graveyard

The sonnet is poetry's elephant graveyard…the place where old poets go before they die.

more apes

They say if you have an infinite number of chimpanzees with keyboards, one of them will randomly type one of Shakespeare’s poems. For my next poem, it’s that good,
trust me, you’re gonna need a few more apes.

unfit line

Trust that the unfit line will benefit the poem. It's a loose wire that the reader must attend to.

sincerely a circle

If a poet can’t be sincere, neither can a critic. So nothing can be sincerely criticized if nothing can be sincerely said by the poet.

faithless poetry

Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetry that had become pervasively representative, and was absolutely faithful to its rational function.

—George Santayana, Reason in Art

bad marriage

The best metaphors are like those marriages that all the relatives said would never work out or last, but somehow did.

opens a fissure

A great line of poetry opens a fissure, allowing a little light from the numinous into this dim world.

harking to the barking

Another ivory tower academic harkening to the strains of street-level poetry.

contract of adhesion

The poem is a ‘contract of adhesion’. Drafted by one party and offered to the reader on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

intervene in the deepest part

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself: not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. Valéry and Stefan George leave us where we picked them up, or else make us more demanding on the formal level of the mind: they are geniuses we have no need of, they are merely artists. But a Shelley, but a Baudelaire, but a Rilke intervene in the deepest part of our organism which annexes them as it would a vice.

—E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard (Arcade Publishing, 1998)

well-appointed or stripped

Poetry can be either well-appointed prose or prose stripped bare. But poetry cannot exist between these two sectors on the prose spectrum.

words at eye level

The lines of the poem were like shelves in a store, displaying certain words for maximum attention. Some like hardware stores chockfull of tools and thing-a-ma-jigs, others like variety stores stocked with cheap toys and inexpensive housewares, and others fine gift shops showing off their objets d’art.

tinder

The first few lines of a poem are tinder. With imagination as the match, that moment when material fuel and mental energy flare up or smolder out.

afterimage

A finely-rendered image leaves a faint afterimage flickering in the mind after the passage has been read.

form without a model

When one speaks of traditional form, one is speaking about the haphazard product of a culture's literary history. How many poetic forms arose naturally out of a particular culture or language? Borrowed, grafted, adapted, one could even say ‘translated’, forms are not inherent to the culture and its language. Trial & error, chance, and the arbitrariness of custom all play a role in the development and perpetuation of forms within any language's poetry. There is nothing particular to the Italian temperament that naturally spawned the fourteen-line sonnet.

blimp titles

I detest seeing titles set in 14 point type (or larger), bolded or emboldened, proclaiming their aggrandized status apart from the body of the poem. Titles big as blimps flying over the tiny text scurrying below, blocking out the reader’s light.

homeland is language

A poet’s only homeland is language.

twain notions

All words are spiritual—nothing is more spiritual than words.—Whence are they? along how many thousands and tens of thousands of years have they come? those eluding, fluid, beautiful, fleshless realities, Mother, Father, Water, Earth, Me, This, Soul, Tongue, House, Fire.

—Walt Whitman, “An American Primer,” The Neglected Walt Whitman, edited by Sam Abrams, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993

--

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are only here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower…But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Ninth Elegy,” Ahead of All Parting, Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Modern Library, 1995

book of spells & divinations

The lexicon is the poet's book of spells and divinations.

hardest turn

Nothing in writing the poem should be harder than starting a second page.

cowboy poetry

Cowboy poetry: Git along little doggerel.

water buffalo's carcass

One of T.S. Eliot’s sillier notions was that the poem’s content was little more than a bit of meat that a burglar carries with him to distract the house dog while he steals away with the valuables. My mind-keep is guarded by a beast that could tear the three heads off Cerberus. So that poet-burglar better be dragging the carcass of a water buffalo.

good cook

My guess is that the poet is also a good cook.

substitution of terms

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Poetry is an opening up to the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

shadow symbol

Often the poetic image casts a shadow symbol.

algebraic

Treat each line as though it were an algebraic equation that must be simplified and reduced to its least terms.

scrimshaw

How important was that image?: As though a kind of scrimshaw etched on human bone.

flarf = word barf

Flarf is word barf. A glorified writing exercise, as if the world needed another
reason or method to perpetrate bad poems. (It’s no coincidence that ‘flarfing’ arose at the same time the ‘paradelle', Billy Collins’ pet form, had its day.) Has anything of lasting interest ever been created by an artist absent a compelling subject or profound emotion? Silence should be a satisfying alternative to the poet who hasn’t any reason to write.

clarity, clarity

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
        thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity

—George Oppen, from “Route”

first love in translation

We fall hard for the first translations of a poet's work that we encounter; and most of the other/later translations we come across strike us as pale or somehow inferior.

simple lay

They may call it a simple lay, and yet the words won’t lie still.

arbitrary & capricious linebreak

A casual survey of contemporary poetry would lead one to believe that the decision of how/where to break the poetic line is either arbitrary or idiosyncratic. There is much workshop talk but little real theory or even practical guidelines to rely on when considering the linebreak. One could say that the linebreak is arbitrary and capricious as they put it in the law.

hate the approximate

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

wide and close up

A poet’s vision is always wide-angle yet with a high degree of acuity.

dictionary thumper

Poet, be a dictionary-thumping fundamentalist!

an anthology's function

An anthology is for finding a few representative poems by minor poets. Large collected and selected poems are the go-to source for the bigger names. Do you read Ginsberg or Creeley in an anthology? Perhaps just a quick check of the contents page to see which poems were chosen. But generally we skip the big names in favor of sampling those poets whose work is less familiar or less widely available.

a blurb is about

A blurb is about the blurb-writer and not about the book.

nobly disheveled

Any bright young man can be taught to be artful. It is impossible to teach taste, but you can teach most anybody caution. It is always the lesser artists who are artful, they must learn their trade by rote. They must be careful never to make false steps, never to speak out of a carefully synthesized character. The greatest poetry is nobly disheveled. At least it never shows the scars of taking care.

—Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to D.H. Lawrence: Selected Poems

roaring loom of time

I would steal Spinoza’s image of the “roaring loom of time’ and state that this is what a great poem eventually becomes.