stick it

Stick that last line like a gymnast dismounting after a perfect routine.

personal space

In a poem the words are given their personal space.

critique of abstractions

Poetry as 'the critique of abstractions'. (after A.N. Whitehead)

by-product of sincerity

Originality is in any case a by-product of sincerity; that is to say, of feeling that is honest and accordingly rejects anything that might cloud the impression, such as unnecessary commas, modifying clauses, or delayed predicates.

—Marianne Moore, Predilections (Viking Press, 1955)

60 second manifesto

I thought this was a well executed performance piece (60 second lecture). I've often observed that much of the 'prosody' of language poetry is expressed in the negative: Poetry that is asyntactic, non-narrative, non-linear or discontinuous, lacking closure, etc. True to form, Bernstein's poem-manifesto is completely phrased in the negative except for the last line, in which he invokes the great Borscht Belt comics' mantra of 'a joke is all in the timing'.

authority and uncertainty

Both lyric authority and lyric uncertainty have great attraction.

appreciated rejection

Years ago, when I was actively submitting poems to little magazines, I got one of those rare rejection notes that are more than rejection slips, they are small critical essays about one’s poem, elucidating this or that strength &/or failure of the poem at hand. Whether or not one agrees with the comments, one has to appreciate the lavish attention given to one’s poem by the rejecting editor. This is especially true if one has ever edited a small magazine. The sheer volume of submissions that one has to open, wade through, and reject, makes it nearly impossible for an editor (often another poet) to take such time and care with any one submission, no matter how attractive or intriguing or very close to acceptance the particular poem or group of poems may be. In the end, this type of rejection, where the poem is addressed so scrupulously and thoroughly, is a greater gift than if the poem had been accepted with the typically short note: “We’d like to take “X” for the next issue. Thanks for sending us your fine work…” The poem is then published in what is ultimately an obscure place in the pages of the little magazine. One gets a publishing credit; but little more is gained from the experience.

Tonight, I got to hear my rejecter, David Wojahn, read his poems. Speaking to him after his reading, I recounted my experience with his overly generous rejection note. He smiled and said it must have been when he was editing Crazyhorse. I hadn’t even remembered the name of the journal. It wasn’t important. Only the rejection note was.

third world dictator

The poet paraded around proud as a third world dictator, his latest little magazine publications splayed like gaudy epaulets on his shoulders.

sopping poetry

I had urge to lift up the poem and to wring out the excess words.

allusions galore

Critical readings mass produce allusions.

thinking and remembering

One definition of poetic power is that it so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes. Can a poem, of authentic strength, be composed without remembering a prior poem, whether by the self or by another? Literary thinking relies upon literary memory…

—Harold Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry (HarperCollins, 2004)

visible wires

Images that are no more than props or stage-set scenery. Even if the images fly or hover, one can see the wires and pulleys.

emerging writer

The term ‘emerging writer’ always makes me think there should be a term for those writers who are fading away or slipping into oblivion. But ‘vanishing writers’ or ‘disappearing writers’ sounds too ominous for that state of benign neglect or collective forgetfulness where they must find themselves.

test drive

He took his new poem for a test drive at the local open mike.

word harvest

After reading the poem one had an urge to harvest it for particular and peculiar words.

under the lash

The line stooped and bloodied under the metrical lash.

what is not seen

The image owes neither its principle nor its power to what is visually given. To justify the poet’s conviction and the image’s frequency and naturalness, we must integrate with it those constituents that we do not see, and whose nature is not visual. They are in fact those by which material imagination is made manifest. Only a psychology of the material imagination could explain this image in its real totality, in its real life.

—Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et le rêves

(translated by Jean-Claude Margolin, in Bachelard’s Philosophy and Poetics, 1989, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America)

existential angst

A post-modernist is afraid to take even himself seriously; afraid of what he won’t find therein. In many ways post-modernism is a manifestation of existential angst.

verbal salients

Lines of poetry: verbal salients into silence.

lack of closure

Lack of closure is only an alternate strategy of closure, because poems, after all, finally, do end...

to trust is not to revere

It’s against our nature to distrust inspiration. But we needn’t revere it as a divine spirit either.

Heidegger’s hut

Small poem: Heidegger’s hut.

noble action

Can a biography be poetic? Only if the anecdotes are transmuted into poems, that is, only if the deeds and the dates cease to be history and become exemplary. But exemplary not in the didactic sense of the term but in the sense of “noble action,” as when we say: unique example. Or: myth, ideal argument and real fable. The poets help themselves to legends in order to tell us real things; and with real events they create fables, examples. The dangers of poetic biography are twofold: the unsolicited confession and the unasked counsel.

—Octavio Paz, “Luis Cernuda: The Edifying Word,” On Poets and Others, translated by Michael Schmidt, Seaver Books 1986

unnatural language

Poetry is unnatural language: supernatural language or language in a primitive state.

rich soil of the language

So many poets have sprung forth solely from the rich soil of the English language.

tip sheets

Blurbs are like tip sheets you pick up when entering a race track. Most of what they say will be proven wrong by the day’s running (or reading).

traceur poet

Poet, be a traceur through the languescape!

image of note

Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain.


—Natasha Trethewey
from “Theories of Space and Time,”
Native Ground (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

brute poets

The brusque, blunt and brutally honest poetry of an Alan Dugan or a William Bronk.

voluptuary of one's vocabulary

A poet living large in the voluptuary of his vocabulary.

discrete element

In poetry the sentence and sentence fragment coexist harmoniously. The latter being like a sentence in that it’s often bounded by a starting capital letter and the endpoint period, however it’s not meant to function as a grammatical unit; rather the sentence fragment serves as a discrete element of thought, speech, image or breath.

compelling content

A style lacking in character only compelling content can give.

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.