skin-deep cover

In the last thirty years, in terms of graphic appeal, the covers of poetry books have made a quantum leap. The insides of the books are much the same as they've been for centuries...with only the poet’s text, legibly laid out, to prove its case.

hard to see

Critics, like other people, see what they look for, not what is actually before them.

—George Bernard Shaw
Epigrams of Bernard Shaw (Haldeman-Julius Co., 1925)

'vearse'

Clearly a poem written by ear.

aseity

A perfect poem, like a god, would possess aseity.

nothing pinned

Without end one can opine about poetry while almost nothing can be proven.

no taxation without publication

The poetry tax: poetry manuscript contest fees.

verb verve

About adjectives: all fine prose is based on verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like:

   The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.

is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement—the limping, trembling, and freezing is going on before your own eyes.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald (in a letter to his daughter, Frances, quoted in The Crack-Up.)

loved beyond reason

One’s last poem is loved beyond all reason.

emerging market

In the waning days of 2008, with the economy in disarray, venture capitalists were taking a hard look at poetry as a possible growth sector. Now you know things are really getting bad.

out of the animal darkness

While excavating archaeological sites in Egypt, some of the few remaining fragments of Sappho’s poetry we have were discovered as stuffing inside a mummified crocodile. Isn’t that an apt analogy for where all poems come from, arising by chance from an obscure animal darkness?

irritable reaching

One should be capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fragments and illogic. [Apologies to John Keats]

micro to macro

The poem as microcosm is lens onto the macrocosm.

never complete

There may be volumes titled ‘Collected Poems’ but there is no such thing as a ‘Complete Poems’.

rivers of poetry

The rivers of poetry flow everywhere, and they do not necessarily converge. [31]

—Elias Canetti, Notes & Notations (Noonday Press, 1994), translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann

thankful for small things

The word ‘elver’ (immature eel) was introduced to me by Theodore Roethke’s poetry. I have never used the word in a poem, but I’m thankful to know it all the same.

be afraid, very afraid

In its writing the poem should scare you at first.

pet poems

Our poems are our pets.

bad trannie

It was automatic writing with a bad transmission.

interruption of the poetic

Poetry as something happening among other things happening. As something happening in language, and to language under siege. Poetry as memory, sometimes memory of the future. Poetry as both fixed and in process, ever a paradox. Above all, poetry as experience, as Philippe Lacou-Labarthe would put it. (He would add, poetry as interruption of the “poetic,” but that’s for some other time.)

—Michael Palmer, “Poetry and Contingency,” Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks (New Directions, 2008)

tallied perfectly

Each line tallied perfectly into the sum of the last line.

impact image

An image that aggressively rearranges the space of human experience.

scroll through

The online poem was a scroll through.

mangroves

Mangrove poetry: thickets of language with many roots sunk in psychologically murky waters.

requisite madness

But if any man come to the gates of poetry without madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to naught by the poetry of madness, and behold their place is nowhere to be found.

—Socrates (Plato), Phaedrus edited by R. Hackworth, Cambridge, 1952

thereafter always moving

The moment you open the book to that page, the poem becomes the perpetuum mobili.

not taken lightly

The poet humbles language by taking it seriously.

descant / disgorge

Only an Ezra Pound could have descanted/disgorged The Cantos.

preordained

When the poem is finished why is it that the words seem preordained?

blank page block

Block: The letters lie buried in an avalanche of whiteness. You can hear only muffled cries, but can’t make out any words.

row, row...

The meter was so strong and regular I thought of the poet as a coxswain with a megaphone calling out: ‘Row, row’…

permanent things

Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.

—Robinson Jeffers, preface to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Random House, 1938,(p. XV)

escape passage

Poem as escape passage from the din and flash of spatio-temporal reality

word gourmand

The poet is a word gourmand: The savor of the syllables together with the texture of the meaning are an experience the poet deeply craves.

wrinkled brow

The lines came at a cost of many years, and may as well have been wrinkles on the poet’s brow.

hometown crowd

Poets in New York City read to each other all the time.

reading backlog

If only my insomnia would come back, I could catch up on my reading.

as the crow flies

...how are we to say what we see in a crow's flight? Is it not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the downstoke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness -- you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.

—Ted Hughes, "Words & Experience," Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, edited by W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (Bloodaxe Books, 2000)

non-negotiable

A poem, by any definition, makes demands on the reader.

too close for comfort

It’s intimidating to put one’s words in proximity to an excellent quote.

skyline

Each line filled one with the anticipation of being on a road approaching the skyline of a city never visited before.

a life's work and then some

At the time of his death at 29, the poet and philosopher Novalis was working on an ‘Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge’. So much like a poet, to think such a project possible, even had he lived a long time.

open outcry

On the language's trading floor, poets buy & sell words furiously in open outcry.

ten to one

For every poet that you know there are ten other crazy and beautiful ones you’ll never know.

theory theists

Theorists and theists, different gods, but mired in dogmas all the same.

broken field runner

Poet, be a broken field runner through the language!

the aesthetic-constructive

Even before non-representative styles were created, artists had become more deeply conscious of the aesthetic-constructive components of the work apart from denoted meanings.

--Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” The Problem of Style (Fawcett Publications, 1966), edited by J.V. Cunningham

my own poems

Too many poets know only their own poems.

poem as hive

A poem is a resonant hive. Hear it, and feel its vibrant thrum.

springboard

The poet walks alone out onto the springboard of the first line.

face value

Of course the facile are afraid of the self.

physicist flummoxed by poetry

Robert Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen and the great mathematical physicist, Paul Dirac, came to him one day and said: "Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write a poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."

(An anecdote quoted in various texts)

beyond the call

One must be truly Heroic to write (or to read) so many successive couplets.

light shelter

Alone in the room, reading in a floor lamp’s cone of light, my hut.

momentous image

The image was a haiku momentous.

alternate alphabet

The reviser’s alphabet: the squiggle, the strike-through, the arrow, the slash mark, etc.

where word is god

Even more than in the poem, it is in the aphorism that the word is god.

—E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, translated by Richard Howard, Arcade Publishing, 1971

blowing the bridges

A poet who blows the bridges of the lines behind him.

bad company

At the open mike I fell in with a bad crowd.

intrument of intimacy

After the advent of email, only the poem was left to replace the letter as an instrument of intimate communication.

burst reader

Some people can read a book from beginning to end. I tend to be a burst reader, reading no more than a page or two at time. Perhaps this explains my poetry affinity.

llittle said thus loud

Words strike us as loud when they’re trite and spoken at a significant decibel level. Uttered at the top of one’s lungs, good poetry won’t hurt the ears.

imaginary parks

According to [Jean] Starobinski, Rousseau argued that civilization veils the transparency of nature; I want to ask if poetry can unveil that transparency….The experiment is this: to see what happens when we regard poems as imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated.

At the same time, it is necessary to recognize that experiments tend to be conducted in artificial conditions. The imagination is a perfect laboratory, cleansed of the contaminations of history. The true poet has to be simultaneously a geographer of the imagination and a historian of the alienations and desecrations that follow the march of ‘civilization’.

--Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Harvard Univ. Press, 2000

DNA of lit

Quotes are the DNA of literature.

bush pilot

Sometimes one fears that last line will never come, one feels like a bush pilot running low on gas, hoping to find an airstrip cut out of the wilderness.

no axioms

Poetry hasn’t axioms; it has some formulas, but all of those have at least one variable.

secret life

He had made poetry his secret life. But he realized after a time that no one was searching for what he’d hidden.

natter manner

The natter mannerists: the ‘talk poets’.

dread word

Dread the last word, so much you enjoyed the poem’s writing, or reading.

sum of the ideas

Tout poète véritable, indépendamment des pensées qui lui viennent de la vérité éternelle, doit contenir la somme des idées de son temps.

Every true poet, independently of the notions that come to him from eternal truth, should contain the sum of the ideas of his times.

—Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840, Preface)

parody paradox

No one quotes from the great parody.

in defense of criticism

One reason to read criticism is to write less, and, secondarily, to make it harder to write the next poem.

our cult

By the late twentieth century it was possible to consider those who pursued poetry as members of a cult.

one thing

Today I want to do one thing: to write a beautiful line.

world in miniature

The genuine poet is all-knowing—he is an actual world in miniature.

—Novalis, Pollen and Fragments, translated by Arthur Versluis (Phanes Press, 1989), p.124

render unto the reader

Render unto the reader what the reader has reason to expect. That may not always be meaning but it must be a meaningful experience.