recast line

Sometimes you have to recast and recast the line like a fly fisherman over a stream of sullen trout. Ever hopeful that on one perfect presentation the line will suddenly draw taut.

no sense of decency

Often after reading a famous poet’s blurb on the back of a poetry book, the attorney Joseph Welsh’s well-known rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy comes to mind: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

prime movers

Are the words being moved around by you, or are they moving you around?

theme park

The poem was a theme park for words.

line relationship

Finally, no particular line is valuable except inasmuch as it performs a dramatic function in relationship to other lines in a particular poem: one kind of line ending becomes powerful because of its relationship to other kinds of line endings.

—James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf 2008)

basic misunderstanding

Bad poetry begins with a misunderstanding of what poetry is.

fewer better

I need to read fewer poems better.

against your grain

Read against your grain.

serious style

Striving for a style so substantive it’s content.

announce themselves

There are poets who announce themselves by how they dress. There are poets who announce themselves by the inventive ways they spell their names. And then there are poets who announce themselves with only a few words at the outset of a poem.

three-dimensional almost

At one point in The Orchards of Syon (XXIII) I say ‘I write / to astonish myself’. This self-astonishment is achieved when, by some process I can’t fathom, common words are moved, or move themselves, into clusters of meaning so intense that they seem to stand up from the page, three-dimensional almost.

—Geoffrey Hill, Don’t Ask Me What I Mean,
edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (Picador, 2003)

wannaBeats

It was a reading full of wannaBeats, but the magic of a specific time can't be reclaimed by declaiming in a similar style.

cathedral and scaffolding

The poem was like a cathedral covered by scaffolding. There was beauty and wonder underneath but it could not be seen for all the critical attention.

home appliance rescues poem

When confronted with a particularly abstract meditation, I want to say to the poet, “What this poem needs is a toaster.”

lyric event

Because of its brevity the lyric can be an event outside of artifice.

conquistador

Poet, be a conquistador of terra tacenda!

music of our misery

What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd around the poet and say to him, "Sing for us soon again"—which is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music, is delightful.

—Søren Kierkegaard, from “A” in Either/Or: Parables of Kierkegaard, edited by Thomas Oden (Princeton, 1978)

poetry / religion

The sign in the bookstore read: ‘POETRY/RELIGION’. Yes, I thought, they are beginning to understand that only faith sustains our genre.

not-for-profit poetry

There are two kinds of poetry presses: IRS sanctioned 501(c)(3) nonprofits and de facto nonprofits.

blindspot

It seems I have a blindspot when it comes to visual poetry. I am vested in the fact that such a thing as a 'poem' can be made from the pure and simple resources of language.

thousand pictures

A word is a well of a thousand pictures.

imaginative elsewhere

Poets dream within their imaginative elsewhere. In Scotland we live with very occasional illumination, so ours is actually a rather sunlit verse; by contrast, the Spanish poet is stalked by shadow.

—Don Paterson, The Blind Eye, Faber & Faber 2007

kindling

Unable to raise a flame from the kindling of the first few lines.

supersaturated

The language of poetry is supersaturated.

modulate this

Political poetry necessarily ranges beyond the modulation of literary poetry.

sound of the pages

It was the sound of turning the pages that he remembered most about the book.

multum in parvo

The phrase multum in parvo has always had a special significance for me. In its terse and compact Latin diction, it exemplifies exactly what it connotes: much in little. The archetype of brevity, however, is not easy to define. Abstraction, conciseness, symbolism, and imaginative potential are basic in the concept. A multiplicity of detail is concentrated into a unified principle, the particular is transformed into the universal, a largeness of meaning is conveyed with the utmost economy of means. This largeness of meaning should be accomplished by a dramatic impact, in a word: insight with a gasp.

—Carl Zigrosser, Multum In Parvo (George Braziller, 1965)

slow to stop

The longer the poem the more extensive the ending. An epic poem should avoid rapid deceleration. Or to put it another way, a freight train or line of barges doesn’t stop on a dime.

life's sake

Art for life's sake. That and that alone.

airport bookstore

Walking into an airport bookstore, behind me hundreds of people streaming in all directions to this or that gate and flight, and I realize how lucky I am to know the classics from the chaff.

instance unloosed

To unloose the instance without effusive utterance.

words to beware of

Certain words aspire to the state of poeticism.

exotic & commonplace

Eliot was from the first a poet with a remarkable range of diction, and with a natural gift for the vividly memorable phrase. He was always consciously aware of the varied resources of English poetic diction and delighted to place an exotic word exactly, or to give us a sudden shock which the unexpected introduction of a commonplace word or phrase can provide.

—Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot, E.P. Dutton & Co 1959

keeps

A poetry impossible to deplete even after repeated readings.

prose poet

Prose poet: Escapee from the chain-gang of the line. He runs on, hearing the dogs in the distance.

limits of spoken word

Tough emcee: He once grabbed a skin-head poet by the short hairs and dragged the guy away from an open mike.

in front of the poet

In front of a new, genuine poet, you always experience the paradoxical and wonderful feeling that all of a sudden you understand a language so far unknown to you.

—Lucian Blaga (Romanian philosopher and poet, 1895-1951), The Élan of the Island, 1946

from A Blaga Anthology on CD, Dr R.T. Allen

book ruins

I awoke one day shadowed by the ruins of stacked books.

that word

A word you want to build a poem around.

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.

zeitgeist

The zeitgeist is expressed more clearly by the obscure many than by the acclaimed few. It is within the ordinary gossip and buzz, within the thousands of unacclaimed poems, that poetry takes shapes. [295]

—Alice Fulton, “A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge,” Feeling as a Formal Language (Graywolf Press, 1999)

crowd of words

In order to reach the poetry, to the crowding words I say, “Make way, make way.”

workshop character

The Ventriloquist’s Dummy: The person who practically hops up on the workshop leader’s lap, saying what he/she expects the workshop leader would want her/him to say about the poem.

moving parts

A poem of many moving parts.

thought experiment

The poem as ‘thought experiment’.

linebreak ache

Linebreak ache: experiencing a poet execute one of those overly clever linebreaks meant to call maximum attention to syntactic meaning or a word within a word.

extraordinary ordinary

"Astonishing" is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events." ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

—Wislawa Szymborska (her acceptance address for the Nobel Prize in Literature)

writing and writing about

To write about poetry, I must be writing poetry.

good shepherd

Poet, be a good shepherd of words! Tend them well, lead them watchfully into the bright pasture of the page.

effortless poetry

It’s hard to get over the effrontery of a poem when obviously so little effort went into its making.

too late now

A poem I should have encountered when I was seventeen.

surface phenomena

But to fool one’s self that definitions are being reached by merely referring frequently to skyscrapers, radio antennae, steam whistles, or other surface phenomena of our time is merely to paint a photograph.

—Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories”

jewel box

The sonnet is poetry’s jewel box.

fall line

Find the fall line through the poem.

(In memory of my nephew. RIP WW)

looking in all the wrong places

You have to get away from the anthologies. You have to find the poems less easily found/bound.

the power under one's hand

At my desk I reach for a pen and realize that I’m at the console that controls the universe.

simple means

Because of its simple means (language), the educated poor are deeply attracted by poetry. The privileged impoverishment of being a poet in this world.

being alive to poetry

Just as our body needs to breathe, our soul requires the fulfillment and expansion of its existence in the reverberations of emotional life. Our feeling of life desires to resound in tone, word, and image.

—Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” translated by Louis Agosta and Rudolf A. Makkreel, Poetry and Experience (Princeton U. Press, 1985)

different standards

It was a poem manufactured to meet precise critical standards; thus it failed the test of art.

switchbacks

Reading the poem was like descending a switchback trail of lines, stopping now and again to take in the view.

debris reader

A poet is a vagrant reader, a debris reader: Cereal boxes, fortune cookies, instruction manuals, pill bottle labels, junk mail, coupons, ticket stubs. Any scrap of printed matter, no matter how inconsequential, may yield a revelation.

rime or responsibility.

A poem of no rime or responsibility.

make a raft

Wrecked and adrift on the high seas of language, lash the lines together and make a raft.

peripheral vision

Some poems come from visions; while other poems are caught out of the corner of one’s eye.

uneducated eye

The Artist is uneducated, is seeing IT for the first time; he can never see the same thing twice.
[...]
The Public and The Artist can meet at every point except the—for The Artist—vital one, that of the pure uneducated seeing. They like the same drinks, can fight in the same trenches, pretend to the same women—but never see the same thing ONCE.

—Mina Loy, "The Artist And The Public," The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, The Jargon Society, 1982

(The first part of the above quote made me think of Monet and his iterations of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, poplars...)

it was there all the time

A poem anyone could have written before someone did.

doesn't sweat the small stuff

The translator takes faith in the universals (ocean, hunger, love, etc.) and lets the trivial matters tied to time or place take care of themselves or fall away.

seed word

What was the ‘seed word’ of the poem?

state of the art

The poetry book was carried in a brown paper sack that he’d raise to eyes now and again for a little peek.

how it happens

320
The old woman came from Myli with a basket of tomatoes so she could enter my poem.

--Yannis Ritsos, from "Monochords," translated by Paul Merchant
In Pieces: an anthology of fragmentary writing, edited by Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press 2006.

tics not techniques

Eccentric capitalization or breaking the line within a word seem more like tics than poetic techniques.

book of forms: pantoum

A pantoum has the formal virtue of when you've read it once, it feels like you've read it twice. Or as Yogi Berra put it, "It's déjà vu all over again." But everyone should write one (and I mean that...just once is more than enough).

series of quotes

In time a good book will become a series of quotes.

resplendent poetry

Words dynamically arrayed—resplendent poetry. (thinking of Olson)

rope ladder

Climbing on words like a rope ladder, the poem must proceed by itself and complete itself. It is not that easy, slowly, very slowly.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951, The Belknap Press (Harvard U. Press), 1974, translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos