sic n stet

Poetry is a copy-editor’s nightmare: One haunted by visions of ‘sic’ and ‘stet’.

self-failed

As an autodidact I found I was flunking out.

the secrets

The Secrets of Poetry


Very long ago when the exquisite celadon bowl
that was the mikado’s favorite cup got broken,
no one in Japan had the skill and courage
to mend it. So the pieces were taken back
to China with a plea to the emperor
that it be repaired. When the bowl returned,
it was held together with heavy iron staples.
The letter with it said they could not make it
more perfect. Which turns out to be true.

—Linda Gregg, All of it Singing: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2008)

i'll pass on that

I think at times that had my personal history and relationships been neglectful, chaotic or ugly, I may have written some better poems. No thanks.

above earth

Poetry as the language of the floating world.

rant timeless

Rant on, but rant timeless, as though you know there is no real end to the struggle or that all the struggles are really one.

no artifact apart

The poem is by-product of existence. It has no value as artifact unless connected to a life.

made new by translation

And so, via such stints of translation, the pleasures of writing have time and again returned to me. With ears for a new sound, with eyes rinsed clear of shady habit, I could hear a line I’d never written and see a beauty further than I’d known. I suppose that‘s all that a new poem is, to a poet: a cadence that was always on the wind but only just now heard as a music; an object always to hand but only just now lifted into the sunshine where it shows the eye a shape and shapeliness it had not seen to use.

—Donald Revell, The Art of Attention (Graywolf Press, 2007)

before ink

Before it is ink the poem is always beautiful. After, it’s often a stain on the page.

shooting blanks

                       Sometimes
you can’t      make
        it      more of
a poem      just by adding      space

publish and perish

For poets it’s more a matter of publish and perish.

density is it

Though not spatial, density of language is a primary dimension of poetry.

carrying the record

But all the greatest landscapes have been painted indoors, and often long after the first impressions were gathered. In a dim cellar the Dutch and Italian master recreated the gleaming ice of a Netherlands carnival or the lustrous sunshine of Venice or the Campagna. Here, then, is required a formidable memory of the visual kind. Not only do we develop our powers of observation, but also those of carrying the record—of carrying it through an extraneous medium and of reproducing it, hours, days, or even months after the scene has vanished or the sunlight died. [p. 29]


—Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime (McGraw-Hill, 1950; Cornerstone Library reprint, 1965; previously printed in Amid These Storms, Scribners, 1932)

warm up

Still practicing your scales in those first few lines?

o.p.

I realize I’m reading a book that should never have gone out of print.

reverse engineering

Spent all day reverse engineering a great poem. Still the poetic ghost in the machine never showed itself.

many tongued within one

The dream of being polyglot within one language.

different planet or new word

“Wait,” Usnelli said, “wait.” “Wait for what?” she said. “What could be more beautiful than this?” He, distrustful (by nature and through his literary education) of emotions and words already the property of others, accustomed more to discovering hidden and spurious beauties than those that were evident and indisputable, was still nervous and tense. Happiness, for Usnelli, was a suspended condition, to be lived holding your breath. Ever since he began loving Delia, he had seen his cautious, sparing relationship with the world endangered; but he wished to renounce nothing, either of himself or of the happiness that opened before him. Now he was on guard, as if every degree of perfection that nature achieved around him—a decanting of the blue of the water, a languishing of the coast’s green into gray, the glint of a fish’s fin at the very spot where the sea’s expanse was smoothest—were only heralding another, higher, degree, and so on to the point where the invisible line of the horizon would part like an oyster revealing all of a sudden a different planet or a new word. … She slipped over the side of the dinghy, let go, swam in that underground lake, and her body at times seemed white (as if that light stripped it of any color of its own) and at times blue as that screen of water. Usnelli had stopped rowing; he was still holding his breath. For him, being in love with Delia had always been like this, as in the mirror of this cavern: in a world beyond words. For that matter, in all his poems he had never written a verse of love: not one. “Come closer,” Delia said. As she swam, she had taken off the scrap of clothing covering her bosom; she threw it into the dinghy. “Just a minute.” She also undid the piece of cloth tied at her hips and handed it to Usnelli. Now she was naked. The whiter skin of her bosom and hips was hardly distinct, because her whole person gave off that pale-blue glow… … Usnelli, in the boat, was all eyes. He understood that what life was now giving him was something not everyone has the privilege of looking at open-eyed, as if at the most dazzling core of the sun. And in the core of this sun was silence. Nothing that was there at this moment could be translated into anything else, perhaps not even into a memory. —Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Poet,” Difficult Loves (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1984), translated from the Italian by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright.

without clangor or flash

A poem that arrested attention effortlessly.

word hoarder

I collect words, long lists of words that delight me, or words that might be useful, words of interest harvested from the writings of others, collected into an idiosyncratic lexicon.

precipitous

From the title the poem fell off quickly.

against entropy

A poem is language organized to resist entropy.

through the palace wall

There is a hole in the palace wall.
A good poem is like that!

You never know what you might see.


—Tukaram (11th C., India)
Quoted in Robert McDowell’s Poetry As Spiritual Practice

my loss

The languages I don’t know laugh at me. I would crawl on hands and knees to be in their company. (In today’s mail arrived a book I'd ordered. It carried the English title MODERN FRENCH POETS ON POETRY. Beautifully organized, but replete with great swaths of the untranslated French from many renowned French poets. I felt like putting my head down in the book and weeping for my loss.

against guidebooks

Do we need another guidebook to tell poets what blank verse is or how many stresses are in a pentameter line? Because most poets can’t access the sources of their art, they write books that lapse into nomenclature and technical know-how. The best books about poetry, however strained and inarticulate, are those that try to explain what it takes to create a poem from the experiences of one’s life within the world in which one lives.

low-responsibility MFA

The low-responsibility MFA program

In these stressful times for young adults there is a need for a new kind of MFA program. The low-responsibility MFA program puts the student in control his/her MFA experience. Students are encouraged but not required to fall into a curriculum that involves any or none of the following pursuits—

• Getting a Tattoo: A Life-Long Accomplishment & Balancing One’s Piercings for Less Neck Pain


• The Tardy Muse: Strategies for Killing Time While Waiting for Inspiration


• Couch-Surfing Across America in the Kerouac Style


• Libraries Are Labyrinths: Getting Lost in the Stacks for Fun (Bring a Snack)


• Thrift-Store Safari: Developing A Good Eye for Bargains in Black


• Go Green Ghost: No Car, No House, Means Minimal Environmental Impact (Carbon in Pencils is Okay)


• Portrait of An Artist: Mastering the Slouch, the Pout, and the Ability to Stare Into Space for Hours on End


• Weekly Playshops: The antiWorkshop for Playing With Words (Location & Time to Be Announced When The Spirit Moves)

Teachers and assigned mentors will keep their distance so as not to stifle the free-wheeling creativity of their students. Students will self-report their progress toward a degree and upon completion of their variable terms of study will optionally present ‘some ideas that they had for poems’ to the director. The director is authorized to grant degrees liberally and without prejudice in respect of the diversity of student experiences and the efforts they have not undertaken.

Tuition will be billed directly to a parental or guardian credit card. Sorry no refunds for early withdrawal or student’s inability to attend because there is no way to tell whether any student is around or not. Note: This school complies fully with ‘non-interference policy’ of The Federation.

reckless

Always something reckless in the language of a great poem.

poetry invented

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living, and from every other expression of man’s nature, poetry would be—I cannot say invented or discovered—poetry would be derived.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974)

weight of the pieces

One should be able to infer from the fragments an important whole. Like the Elgin Marbles, one can sense the grandeur of the greater whole from which the pieces came.

like water into light

The poem as osmosis mosaic.

arguments with the masters

Mr. Wordsworth, I’m less interested in emotion recollected in tranquility and more inclined to emotion collected into a full ecstatic trance.

no favor to the reader

One of those breathless hyperbolic introductions that no poet could or should have to read up to.

bodying forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering: in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969) [n.b.: M.C. stands for 'Mary Caroline']

second generation

His poems were like Frank O’Hara’s except he didn’t work for MOMA and hang out with cool, cutting-edge artists in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

not a pretty sight

Representation that sears the gauze onto reality.

one step ahead

Trust that the reader gets what you’re after just before you do.

military parade

Why do all those regular stanzas remind me of a military parade?

after heraklitas

One can’t wade into the same line of poetry twice.

at the back of the mind

Muse poetry is composed at the back of the mind: an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined; in which intuitive thought reigns supralogically, and personal rhythm subdues metre to its purposes. The effect on the readers of Muse poetry, which its opposite poles of ecstasy and melancholia, is what the French call a frisson, and the Scots call a ‘grue’—meaning the shudder provoked by fearful or supernatural experiences.

—Robert Graves, “The Dedicated Poet,” Oxford Addresses on Poetry (Doubleday & Co., 1962)

too thinned

A poem pared to air.

house slippers

The lines padded along in soft iambs as though written in house slippers.

years of mystical thinking

So much mysticism surrounds ‘the linebreak’ in free verse poetics.

storied song

A lyric clad in narrative.

prose poem

Prose poem: A poem comfortable with the right margin.

empire of chimeras

Horace was not one of these who believe that the caprice of the poet suffers no law above itself. In modern times, Young sounded the tocsin of Pseudo-Romanticism, when he declared that “in the fairy-land of fancy genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” The poet, indeed, can create a world of his own, and, if he is endowed with the true genius of the poet, can insure our belief in his creation. But, even the poet must not offend our sense of congruity by endeavouring to unite things that are essentially incompatible. Horace would have no sympathy with the false Romanticism which could bring into being a world of chimeras having no conceivable relation with existing experience. Such things he would regard as the fevered dreams of a diseased imagination. He would thus look askance at the riot of imagination, and the unfettered play of emotion, which many regard as the divine prerogative of poets.
…
In a later passage of the Ars Poetica, he seems to go still further, when he insists that the poet’s fictions be “proxima veris.” [435-436]

—J. F. D’Alton, Roman Literary Theory & Criticism (Russell & Russell, 1962)

no middleground

A metaphor that wouldn’t meet halfway.

kitchen sink songs

Just another kitchen-sink Cantos.

experience shaped

Experience shaped expression. Too much poetry is written from the realm of reading.

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.