uncritic

Critic without a cause.

what mattered

It was not important that [the poems] survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.


—Wallace Stevens, from “The Planet On The Table”

shadow presence

Metaphor: from the shadow of a thing emerges another thing long hidden.

sink hole

A line that stepped unsurely over its caesura.

r.i.p.

His ideal reader died.

free radical

In chemistry the ‘radical’ (e.g., an atom without a paired electron) tends to be very reactive. We try to find certain words that have an unpaired electron, so to speak, that will attract and create the reaction that is metaphor, two things binding as they react to (and against) one another and if not creating a chemical reaction per se, creating a strong mental or emotional response in us.

not what is seen

The underside of a leaf
Cool in shadow
Sublimely unemphatic
Smiling of innocence

The frailest stems
Quivering in light
Bend and break
In silence

This poem like the paintings, is not really about nature. It is not what is seen. It is what is known forever in the mind.

—Agnes Martin, "Notes," Writings / Schriften (Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992) edited by Herausgegeben von Dieter Schwarz

no compromise

To not compromise the poetry through the fit and finish of composition.

welcoming community

The heckler at the poetry reading was invited to come back next week to enter the slam.

small chevalier

Lowering one’s flimsy lance, charging uphill at the literary windmill of the great poet’s reputation. But no one’s inside anyway, and you look small due to scale.

dazzle draft

Unable to see beyond the dazzle of the first draft.

concealed criticism

When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold’s criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one’s observation; for he was never more essentially a critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry “is at bottom a criticism of life,” still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.

—G.W.E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1904)

oh too pleased

A reader a little oh too pleased with his poetry.

hit it

From the first line the poem was pedal down.

orator extraordinaire

Slam poet, be a superhero whose power is oratory.

sharp salient

A poem spiked on the salient of a single line.

few or many

There are poets who readily have a few poems that speak for them, that make their reputations, and then there are those poets who exist only in oeuvre, only after reading the body of work can one see fully their achievement.

weather report

There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing…The folk poet knows that it’s wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

cease and desestina

A cease and desestina order had to be issued against the rime-crazed poet.

post-facto ticket

Poetry readings are often free admission. When you buy the poet’s book on the way out, it’s sort of like purchasing a post facto ticket.

fit for song

A poem that would have to dumb itself down before it could become a song.

holy icon

An image with the aura of a holy icon.

irregularity

       When the Chinese made
a circle of stones on the top of their wells
one would be a little skewed to make the circle
look more round. Irregularity is the secret
of music and to the voice of great poetry.

—Jack Gilbert
from “The Secret,” The Dance Most of All (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

acceptable poem

My poem was accepted. It’s perfectly acceptable, if unexceptional. The poem has mastered the secret handshake and matches well with editorial tastes. The poem thus conforms to the fashions of the times, securing its acceptability into the good company of its fellow poems. In other words, my poem goes along to get along.

only poetry

When everything is stripped away, as after a disaster, and one is left with nothing but language, then, then one has poetry.

lost count of

How many poems have I lost to alcohol or sloth?

against is all

They who can’t define their art other than in antithesis.

to incite a caring

One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god. Yet its very openness often signifies indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiqués, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite a caring.

—John Berger, “The Hour of Poetry,” Selected Essays (Vintage, 2001)

far too puny

Language was far too puny for his great theology:
But, oh! His thought strode through those words
Bright as the conquering Christ…

—Thomas Merton, from “Duns Scotus,” The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1980)

creative writing

The creative writing professor crafted lovely glowing introductions for the famous visiting writers.

sweet spiel

Poet, be a salesperson with a sweet spiel and a hard close.

jailbreak

Ruled notebook: Frustrated, I turn it on its side and begin to write. The words hanging on the bars of the cage, biding their time for a jailbreak.

what books are made of

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt plura mala, quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber.

Here you'll read some good things, some so-so, and a number of bad. There’s not another way, Avitus, to make a book.

—Martial, Epigrammata, XV, 16

singing in between

In the lyric even the interstices sing.

one look

A poet gazes the world in the glance of a single line.

low-yield process

The refining into language of what was raw imagination.

craftwork

What some call craft I’d call a taking care.

poet game

I watched my country turn into
a coast-to-coast strip mall
and I cried out in a song:
if we could do all that in thirty years,
then please tell me you all -
why does good change take so long?
Why does the color of your skin
or who you choose to love
still lead to such anger and pain?
And why do I think it's any help
for me to still dream of
playing the poet game?

—Greg Brown, "The Poet Game" (Red House Records, 1994)

everyone's doing it

Everyone reads fiction but everyone writes poetry.

unruly

The lyric obeys no rules: emotions unleashing the language from the laws of usage and semantic convention.

fragile lines

As though written on tissue paper the poem felt as if it could come apart at any moment.

usual suspect

The poet had opportunity and motif.

strange terms

Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.

—Titus Lucretius Carus, “Of The Nature Of Things”
(translation by Wm. Ellery Leonard)

language algebra

The line was language algebra: a formula devoid of the phenomenal.

skin deep

A test for a line of poetry: Could you live with these words as a tattoo?

organizing principle

A word array that must ultimately well up as speech.

ruined beauty

Classicism achieves its beauty as it is abraded and rubbed away, when it falls into ruin.

the bird, the flower, the tree

Intuition can only operate by an immediate contact with the thing. In poetry what in logic are called subjective and objective are united. There is no observer and thing observed, both are one; the poet is the bird, the flower, the tree, the Pope (Browning in “The Ring and the Book”), the ship (Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner”), and anything else to which he is able to join himself. And if this union does not take place there can be no poetry.

—Michael Oakeshott, “Philosophy, Poetry and Reality”, What is History? (Imprint Academic, 2004)

to preserve the pure

To try to hold oneself apart from the institutional inertia and those internecine critical forces that beset the pure spirit of what poetry is.

handmade kite

Write the poem on a handmade kite. Let the kite be lifted high & far in the wind…then cut the string.

Horace inscription

“Decant your wine” (I.11) but
always “cherish the golden mean.” (II.10)

After his reading of The Odes of Horace (The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2008), the above was inscribed to me by the translator Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz.

overheard in nature

A poem overheard in nature.

crow words

Insolent as crows the letters perched there on the ruled lines of the notebook.

nonpareil line

The nonpareil line annuls all before it. So you must strike the others, and start over.

tradition not by habit

As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoroughly considered. The historical comparisons chosen are part of a continuous tradition relevant to my concerns. When Eliot writes about tradition, his comments are equally relevant to architecture, notwithstanding the more obvious changes in architectural methods due to technological innovations. “In English writing,” Eliot says, “we seldom speak of tradition…Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to a work approved, of some pleasing archeological reconstruction…Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged…Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor…”

—Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966)

self-explanatory

I’ve never felt there was a reason to explain my love for poetry.

recasts experience

The poetic image that forever recasts one’s experience of reality.

order of the day

Only this: Ever try to avoid the obvious.

letterpress to the rescue

There is nothing like seeing a display of fine letterpress books and broadsheets, the simple & elegant designs, the almost palpable fonts, the textures and muted colors of the beautiful papers, to restore one’s faith in poetry in its purest sense. Even slight discolorations at the edges of pages, or the fading of some of the text, reminds you of what it was that first drew you to the art of poetry.

like cams

The words like cams rising to do their work as the line turns in the mind.

pressed into service

Small press poetry publishing: socialized self-publication.

boule de neige

Perhaps poetry, or at least lyric poetry, may be characterized by the two central illusions that define the nature of a boule de neige: the still moment disturbed into being (a wash of images across the reader’s eye), and the following slow contraction of time as consciousness settles back into place (for what does the snowfall signify, except the poignant rhythms of a dreaming mind?).

Looking back, I suspect it’s a similar experience of time that first attracted me to poetry, and I doubt if over the years the original attraction has changed very much. What I loved then, I love now, is that aura of heightened animation with which poetry tends to surround itself (the syllables of a line of verse like the snowfall of the boule de neige)—as if, not the atmosphere, but the subject itself were momentarily stirred to life. As if the mind might actually sustain that life.

—Sherod Santos, “An Art of Poetry: Postscript to Abandoned Railway Station’,“ What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry (Gibbs-Smith, 1995), edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill

Bernoulli's principle

If a fluid is flowing horizontally and along a section of a streamline, where the speed increases it can only be because the fluid on that section has moved from a region of higher pressure to a region of lower pressure; and if its speed decreases, it can only be because it has moved from a region of lower pressure to a region of higher pressure. Consequently, within a fluid flowing horizontally, the highest speed occurs where the pressure is lowest, and the lowest speed occurs where the pressure is highest. (cited from Wikipedia)
--
A line of poetry obeys this dynamic.

never mind

Laughable now to think that surrealists, like Breton, believed ‘automatic writing’ was actually possible.

visibly bad

The New Yorker always publishes crappy poems until it publishes yours.

beginning and end

To write each line as though it was both the first and the final line of the poem.

blurbs in the bag

What are the odds? Spots for four blurbs on the back of a book of poems, and all are positively glowing. How lucky is that?

chocolate

The first notion I had that writing is not the registration of one’s comings and goings came with my reading, at about eighteen, of Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” in some anthology. What I remember of that poem is the thrill of the word “chocolate” muscular and solitary on the page. This was not chocolate, but a manifestation of the poet’s arrogant appropriation of anything. The word virtually sailed free of all connections.

—Gilbert Sorrentino, “Writing and Writers: Disjecta Membra,” Something Said (Dalkey Archive Press, 2001)

lean and well-seen

Poetry as the laconic iconic.

extrapolate

Sometimes the poet must extrapolate from the poem’s known vocabulary to find the word or words needed to complete the line.

paradox of the one-off

When a work is sui generis it becomes less useful as a model to latter poets. It’s too tight a box, leaving no elbow room for the followers, marking as merely derivative all their attempts to creatively employ its attributes.

winter view

Winter View

If this were a rooftop
covered with snow,
these words
would be
bird tracks
instead
of a poem.

—William Michaelian, Winter Poems (Cosmopsis Books, 2007)

trust too much

You trust your art too much.

without words

The terror and promise of a fresh notebook.

trace elements

Trace elements of your first poem present in your last.