free as in free of

Free verse poetics is based on the immediacy and robust resources of prose itself. By eschewing both traditional/formalist artifices (regular meter and/or rime scheme) and the typographically disjointed arrays of projective verse, free verse avoids the verbal distraction of excessive mediation and visual display.

Tolstoy as the fox

If we may recall once again our divisions of artists into foxes and hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled, but he believed only in one vast unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling—the degree of its ‘oscillation’, the ebb and flow, the minute movements[…]—the inner and outer texture and ‘feel’ of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations. The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in [Tolstoy’s] world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation...but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space—an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated.

—Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”

skiffle language

The poem as ‘skiffle’ language: scrounged, improvised, vagrant.

no brakes

Blew right through that line break.

in the desert of theory

Listen hard enough and you can hear prophet poets chanting, singing, raving out in the desert of theory. Nothing out there was created to hear them.

unnecessary elective surgery

How often when we revise are we performing elaborate cosmetic surgery on a corpse?

first, second and third poetry

The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art into one thing.

—Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist.

typographical f/x

All that typographical f/x without an engaging text.

word clouds

All poems begin as ‘word clouds’ in the mind.

water-boarded into silence

You have to snatch a poet off the street, hastily escort him to an undisclosed location, and then water-board him, in order to make him stop spouting poetry.

creative dynamic

As imagination tests mimesis, in turn mimesis bests imagination.

wordum wrixlan

Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan—to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric forms in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse.

—Seth Lerer, “Caedmon Learns to Sing,” Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007)

ghost in the machine

Poetry: software written in a programming language for the human soul.

power phrase

The rhetorical power of a single phrase comprised of a short Anglo-Saxon word and a long Latinate word.

unfounded sounds

No reason but for sound they should have entered my mind together: The Clash’s “London Calling” and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.”

break silence

A poem that could make a Cistercian break silence.

so over

The moment it was a movement it was over.

spot in the iris

263. Imagine someone pointing to a spot in the iris in a face by Rembrandt and saying, “the wall in my room should be painted this colour.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Remarks on Colour, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Translated by Linda L. McAlister & Margarete Schättle.
(U. of California Press)

good shave

Faced with scraggly and unkempt poetry one is tempted to reach for Ockham’s razor to give it a good shave.

desperate struggle

The poem is a desperate struggle between release and resolve.

block/blank

Caught between a block and a blank place.

perspective

The commonplace observed closely from an odd angle.

not a luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

word horde

Poet, be a great Khan of language, gathering your word horde just over the horizon of consciousness.

purified speech

A form of purified speech that is not a prayer.

beautiful labyrinth

In 2004 Raymond Danowski donated 75,000 volumes of poetry to the Emory University library. Reports at the time said the collection would fill several tractor-trailers. I want to get lost in those stacks someday and not come out of that beautiful labyrinth for about a year.

ink or pixels

In ink or pixels, it’s all the same.

café captive

The poet did his writing in a café and there, too, he read his work aloud.

purity and economy

Nothing on the page had the purity and economy of the whole number tucked away along the lower margin.

not obscure but a blur

[Browning] is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realize with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it lives along the animated line of its labor, springs from thread to thread and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man’s as the speed of a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his writing except with a mind thoroughly alert, an attention awake to all points, a spirit open and ready to be kindled by the contact…


—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Browning’s obscurity,” 1875, reprinted Swinburne as Critic edited by Clyde K. Hyder (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)

all true translations

I read three translations of the poem, and all in their own way were perfectly true.

needed a Nietzsche

Whether poetics needed a Nietzsche or not, it got one in the form of Ezra Pound.

original vispo

Certainly the first visual poetry arose by accident in palimpsest.

semantic drift

Poetry is the wind behind semantic drift.

thought for a new year

Poets are always ready to talk about the difficulties of their art. I want to say something about its rewards and joys. The poem comes in the form of a blessing—"like rapture breaking on the mind," as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

—Stanley Kunitz, from the preface to Passing Through (Norton, 1995)

try to return

It is in poetry that we try to return our love for language.

recalibrate tolerances

As soon as a critic starts to effuse about ‘perfection’ you can surmise that a recalibration of tolerances is in order.

closer to real

Surrealism gathers strength when it hews closest to the real.

never better

Every couple of years the famous poet would publish another book and the critics always said “He’s never been better,” as though that were a compliment.

whole at once

He alone can conceive and compose, who sees the whole at once before him.

—Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, edited by John Knowles

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.