old technology

Language is perhaps our oldest technology.

syllabus poetry

From the moment it was written it was syllabus poetry. A 'text' that went straight to academe without even a passing wave to an audience.

tamper-proof

To have written a tamper-proof poem.

parts of speech

A noun is not a word; it’s an image forming out of an alphabetic mist. A verb is a blurred noun. An adjective is a noun’s coat of paint. An adverb is a verb’s extravagant flourish. And the other parts of speech just don’t matter.

sarcophagus

A desiccated body lies in an ornate sarcophagus of form.

close to nature

Poetry keeps language close to nature.

image of note: a rabid fox

I with the sin of despair
for the world my species has spoiled,

the fox for its hunger,
its rabies, its dirty coat
slung over a frail skeleton.

(from the poem "The Ruiner of Lives," by Chase Twichell,
reprinted in Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems,
edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007)

pyschological flowering

Not confessional; rather the soul exposed in its full archetypal and psychological flowering.

local poetics

‘All poetics is local’. (To turn Senator Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neil’s maxim.)

one and done

I can admire an avant-garde of one. As a group an avant-garde is less attractive. Something like an art gang.

interchangable blurbs

Blurbs should be attached to the backs of books with velcro. They're so generic and indistinguishable in their praise, that it would be a kind of efficient recycling to pull them off of the old books and to reapply them to newly released titles.

the sublime ratio

When evaluating art, try to measure the ratio of surface to essence. The lower the value the better the art.

what is poetry anyway?

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
      Can anyone die without even a little?

--Mark Strand, concluding lines from “The Great Poet Returns,” Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1998)

palpable

You read it to yourself silently, yet you could feel it in the mouth and in the ears.

items of interest

A poem lurks in every list.

ultimate compliment

No higher compliment can be paid to a poem than to have it typed out, folded, and then slipped into one’s breast pocket.

not a sandheap

S.H. Butcher, best known for his translations and commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics (New York, 1907)…wrote previously a survey entitled “Greek Literary Criticism” where he presented fully and clearly the significance of Phaedrus 264C*. After quoting the whole passage, Butcher says: “Here, observe, and for the first time, the law of internal unity is enunciated, as a primary condition of literary art—now commonplace, then a discovery...Organic as distinct from mechanical unity; not the homogeneous sameness of a sandheap, but a unity combined with variety, a unity vital and structural, implying mutual dependence of all the parts, such that if a part is displaced or removed, the whole is dislocated...From this point of view the unity and artistic beauty of a literary composition are found to reside in a pervasive harmony, a single animating and controlling principle.” (pp. 192-193)

[quoted from a delightful treatise on the subject of: Organic Unity In Ancient & Later Poetics (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1975) by G. N. Giordano Orsini]

*”Every discourse must be composed like, or in the likeness of, a living being, with a body of its own as it were, so as not to be headless or feetless, but to have a middle and members arranged in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”

muse crossing

The sign said ‘Muse Next 10 Miles’. So I backed off the accelerator and kept my eyes peeled. (‘I have a feeling we’re not in Maine anymore, Toto.’)

running on empyrean

It’s easy to be a poet at twenty and one can run on language adrenaline well into one’s thirties. But being a poet at fifty, sixty, and beyond, takes an Apollonian stamina.

underlined for naught

After so many years I turn to this page again without an inkling of what attracted me to underline a certain passage.

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.