rococo musings

A poet much too much impressed by his rococo musings. (Thinking of John Ashbery.)

time stain

A poem tainted by its times.

image of note

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

—Tony Hoagland, from "A Color of the Sky," What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003)

intermittent

Not a small press, an intermittent press.

self proof

First the lyric poet must prove to herself the efficacy of her utterance. No one will be won over by an uncommitted voice.

long hall

A poem with a long, elaborately decorated foyer.

national poetry month

at the start

of National Poetry Month —

April Fool's Day


—Stanford M. Forrester

all in

Poet, methodically stack your lines, then push all in.

discarded word

The word the rhetoricians rejected has become the poem’s cornerstone. (after Psalm 118:22)

dysfunctional workshop

The Dysfunctional Workshop: Dramatis Personae

Paula Tico: Even in your poem about your dead cat she felt you failed to see the complicity of or to indict global capitalism for its insidious influence on the pet food industry.

Dick Tum: He cannot critique a poem without dragging out an old saw. He folds his arms, leans back in his chair and intones “I think it was Coleridge who said, ‘best words in the best order’, and in this poem…,” or “William Carlos Williams famously had it, ‘No ideas but in things’, and your poem is full of…”

Polly Wanzakraker: She practically sits on the workshop leader’s shoulder and repeats verbatim what he/she has just said.

Ed Itur: He always reads with a red pen in his hand. The only thing he has to say about your poem is that you spelled ‘feign’ wrong or your last line is a sentence fragment.

Buzz Cutt: When he clears his throat to speak you can hear a chainsaw starting up. His terse solution for every poem is to shave off the first 10 lines and to hack off the last 5 while you’re at it.

Di Gress: She’ll tease out one line after another that reminds her of a story or any topic she happens to be thinking about, which leads to that, then this, then that again…

Otis Grande: Praising you past embarrassment, he loves your poem, he loves everything you have written and everything you will ever write.

Ben Daredundat: He can always find one of his poems that your poem reminds him of and he’ll quote long passages of his poem to prove the point.

Art Istek: With his head down, scribbling furiously, he says little during workshop. Afterwards he hands back your poem almost blotted out with arrows and diagrams, the margins filled with elaborate graffiti. You save the copy in case he becomes famous one day.

[Feel free to add your own characters.]

ladder to earth

Poem like a ladder let down from heaven to earth.

inside / outside

What part of a poem's value inheres to the work itself, and how much has accrued by virtue of years of critical attention?

it's all poem

The poems are all telling me the same thing. “This is all a poem. You’re alive, get it?”

*

Ah, poetry. It’s such a pleasure to have something that does not demand to be understood, in a world where clearly there is already not one iota of understanding to spare.
[162]

—Nick Piombino, Contradicta (Green Integer, 2010)

one nod is enough

A poet can ride for years on the least bit of attention or acknowledgement.

orphan line

Beautiful little orphan line, someday I’ll find a modest home for you, and you will make of it a mansion.

class action case

The critic is a masterful litigant, taking him/herself as an aggrieved party and from that singular example making a class action case for all readers.

free bird

At the poetry reading they were all holding up lighters and calling out for me to read “Free Bird,” as I went flapping through pages of my books to no avail.

daily record

Like a ship’s log while in port, poem after poem, quotidian entries of little import.

proper names

Now, I am a person who likes simple words. It is true, I had realised before this journey that there was much evil and injustice in the world that I had now left, but I had believed I could shake the foundations if I called things by their proper name. I knew such an enterprise meant returning to absolute naiveté. This naiveté I considered as a primal vision purified of the slag of centuries of hoary lies about the world.

—Paul Celan, "Edgar Jené and The Dream About The Dream," Collected Prose (Carcanet, 1986), translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

the 12 steps

The Poet's Twelve Steps

• We admitted we were powerless over words—that our lives had become unmanageable.


• Came to believe that a Poetry greater than ourselves could restore us to madness.


• Made a decision to turn our wiles and our lives over to the care of Chaos as we misunderstood It.


• Made a haphazard and fearful moral inventory of ourselves.


• Disavowed to Chaos, to ourselves, and to another human reader the inexact nature of our wrongs.


• Were entirely ready to have Chaos imbue all these defects of character.


• Humbly asked Chaos to display our shortcomings.


• Made a list of all readers we had to harm, and became willing to make mayhem upon them all.


• Made direct mayhem upon such readers wherever possible, except when to do so would inure them or others.


• Continued to lose personal inventory and when we were right promptly denied it.


• Sought through poetry and criticism to improve our conscious contact with Chaos as we understood It, playing only for ignorance of Its Will for us and the poetry to carry that out.


• Having had a poetic awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to mumble this message to readers, and to misapply these precepts in all our affectations.

utter limits

Wholly unafraid of writing about anything.

stick figures

There was no one behind the poem and no real people in the poem…thus the words reverted to groups of letters that began to look like so many stick figures.

line light

One can tell by the light in the lines whether a morning poet, an afternoon into evening poet, or an after midnight poet.

night rain

Sometimes at night I’ll awaken to rainfall on the roof tiles and I think of poets all over the world, their fingers tapping out words on the keys.

monotonous obstinacy

I feel sure of the fundamental and lasting unity of all that I have written or will write—and I am not talking of an autobiographical unity or unity of taste, which are trivialities—but of a unity of themes, vital interests, the monotonous obstinacy of one who feels sure that the very first day he has found the true world, the eternal world, and can do nothing but revolve around the great monolith and take off chunks and work at them and study them in every possible light.

—Cesare Pavese from “Work is Wearying,” quoted in The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Cesare Pavese’s Works (Cornell U. Press, 1968) by Gian-Paulo Biasin, translated by Yvonne Freccero.

silence of the iambs

After the mid-Twentieth Century free-verse slaughter, it was the silence of the iambs.

born blind

A young poet often can’t see clichés: One must be well-read to recognize well-worn words.

salvage operation

Poet, be a language salvager.

lost relative

My language skills are meager, still I don’t trust a translation without the original en face.

stylus sensor

I was trying to listen through my pen.

forced effort

For the poet, a forced effort seldom gives birth to anything but falsification. And it cannot be different for the thinker. Whatever good that was thought happened without effort. To sense the truth is the art of being still. [p. 31]

—Vilhelm Ekelund, The Second Light (North Point Press, 1986)

trained growth

Structure and language: trellis and vine.

narrative coming through

Certain stories are instant poetry: The words must simply get out of the way of the telling.

schoolyard scuffle

It was The School of Quietude vs. The Rest is Noise.

it's that simple

Subject enacted, language exacted.

no ambition at all

I shall never forget one autumn evening in the tiny office of T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber’s the voice of the poet of the Quartets ending our conversation about Valéry: “He was so intelligent that he had no ambition at all.”

—George Seferis, in his preface to Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music (Harvard Univ. Press, 1942)

got your backside covered

Blurbs are applied to the backsides of books because that's the place for butt-lickers.

dada dead end

Veered down a dada dead end.

poem not diploma

At the end of an MFA in Poetry, they shouldn’t give you a diploma. They should hand you a framed copy of the one poem you’re willing to call an emblem of your literary merit.

template theory

He had a template theory to drop over any text.

here yet be dragons

here yet be dragons


so many languages have fallen
off the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost

people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who

among us can speak with so fragile
tongue and remain proud?


—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)
Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (Boa Editions, 2000)

armed to the teeth

Poet, come armed to the teeth with words when confronting the page.

--
The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

[quoted from AskOxford.com]

syntactic scar

A syntactic inversion in a poem is like a language scar. Most are crude reminders of a severe wound, but like scars some do have a strange attraction.

loose ends

A poetry made from language’s loose ends.

stadium

I estimate it would take a stadium seating about 100,000 to contain all the contemporary poets*. What a compelling cacophony it would be if they all stood at once and began to recite their poems.


*US only, actively publishing/performing

prison release

There comes a point always, in painting a picture, when it becomes a prison; I long to get away from it, to be quit of it forever, yet the only release, with a clear conscience, must come from carrying it thru.

—Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield’s Journals, The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (State University of New York Press, 1993)

protracted block

Stalked by a man from Porlock.

the bear fishing

When I think of Charles Olson’s poetics I think of how a bear fishes for salmon during the spawning run. There is a lot splashing about, paws swiping at the rushing waters, headlong lunging into the shallows, but some nice fish do get caught.

gray crowd

If MFA programs are attracting so many eager young poets, why is it that the audience at so many poetry readings is filled with graying elders?

deep divide

Controversies about the smallest of poems (e.g. Saroyan’s ‘lighght’) tell one a lot about the deep divide in poetic sensibility.

baby-talk

Language was not only a means of communication for new ideas, it was also a repository for the history of progress. In an article on Languages which Turgot had projected for the Enclyclopédie but which, like so many of his plans, never came to fruition, he intended to show that throughout the ages language was an index of the stadial development of nations, since words were invented only when there were ideas demanding utterance. The mere existence of certain words was witness to a complex civilization.

[…Turgot:] “The study of language, if well done, would perhaps be the best of logics. In analyzing, in comparing words of which they are fashioned, in tracing from the beginning the different meanings which they acquired, in following the thread of ideas, we will see through which stages, through which metamorphoses men passed….This kind of experimental metaphysics would be one and the same time the history of the human mind and the history of the progress of its thoughts, always fitted to the needs which gave birth to them. Languages are at once their expression and their measure.”

[…] Like Vico, Turgot’s fragments also recognized a stage of human consciousness which was so primitive that man could only give voice to his ideas in myth, in metaphor, in pictorial images. And for Turgot, as for Hume, there is a manifest superiority in the abstract attitude over the concrete. Turgot was ultimately led by his worship of reason to prefer purest mathematical abstraction over all forms of knowledge and to look upon the metaphors and images in which the ancients communicated their ideas as a sort of baby-talk, expressive perhaps, but a form which had to be outgrown. Eighteenth-century French thinkers like Turgot were conscious of the death of the poetic spirit in their society, and they did not regret it.

—Frank E. Manuel, “Turgot, Barone De L’Aulne,” The Prophets of Paris (Harvard U. Press, 1962, pp30-32)

canon echo

Can one’s writing ever get far enough away to escape the canon’s echo?

at sea

A poem at sea apart from its sequence.

the dead

Why does opening the Norton Anthology always feel like lifting a coffin lid?

hanging pause

At the end of a poetry reading there is that hanging pause before the plausive moment.

critiprop

It wasn’t clear if his talent was that of a critic or a propagandist.

spiritual control

The image is a method of asserting or reasserting spiritual control over the material.

—C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image

facio fugit

A style compelling as fashion but about as durable.

grammar

A poem marred by the precision of its grammar.

famous poet

“I’d like to introduce you to the famous poet, X Y,” he said. “Ah,” she replied, “his lack of reputation shadows him.”

cowlick

A cowlick line that wouldn’t be combed flat.

no substance but itself

All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is the question—a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, translated by Richard Howard (Arcade Publishing, 1998)

image indigestion

A poem so full of images it was burping haiku.

imaginative lift

Persian carpet poetry.

faith healer

Poet, be a faith-healer to those ailing and wayward ears!

poetry bubble

When the poetry bubble burst it caused an economic yawn.

look back and over

Time, in fact, effects that for a fine poem which distance performs for a fine view. When we look at a magnificent city from some height that is above and beyond it, we are sufficiently removed to lose sight of its little alleys, blind lanes, and paltry habitations; we can discover nothing but its lofty spires, monuments, and towers, its palaces and its sanctuaries. And so it is with a poem, when we look back upon it through a long interval of time. We have been in the habit of hearing only the finest passages, because these only are repeated; the flats and failings we either have not read, or do not remember. The finest passages of Milton, or of Shakespeare, can be rehearsed by many who have never waded through all the pages of either. Dacier observed that Homer was a thousand years more beautiful than Virgil, as if Calliope traced the etymology of her name to her wrinkles, rather than her dimples. Voltaire carried this opinion so far, that he seems to infer that distance of time might make a poet still more interesting by making him invisible; for he asserts that the reputation of Dante will continually be growing greater and greater, because there is nobody now that reads him. This sentiment must be a source of great consolation to many of our modern poets, who have already lived to see themselves at this point of greatness, and may in some sort be said to have survived their own apotheosis.

—Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon: or, Many things in few words
(London: Williams Tegg. 1866)

language proof

A poem that no translation could dilute.

recycled criticism

It was evident by the critic’s writing that everything he knew he’d learned.

protean word

A protean word that seemingly changed its definition and even its pronunciation before one’s eyes and ears.

more snow

Snow

I wish I could stop thinking of Robert
Frost whenever it snows.

—Joanne Kyger
About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007)

getting comfortable

The poem plopped itself down in an overstuffed sofa in the folds of my brain, and made itself at home.

cellblock

Words restless in their cellblock of form.

type cast

A poet started a press. The poet became a press. There was no poet other than the press.

coat of arms

There were so many symbols in the poem it might have been mistaken for a coat of arms.