instead of reviews

I’m sorry your book was not reviewed, but those were some nice blurbs you got.

keen eyed

A good critical reader is like an osprey dropping from the sky to seize with its talons that one careless word lolling at the poem's surface.

thus sprach zenith

Poetry is the apotheosis of speech.

downhill from there

Tripped over that first line and the whole poem was a slo-mo pratfall after that.

deep song

It is rightly called “deep” song, he tells us, because it is “deeper than all the wells and all the seas that surround the world, much deeper than the present heart that creates it and the voice that sings it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from distant races, crossing the cemetery of the years…” Beneath the verses a question throbs, he says, a terrible question without an answer. Life is seen through an impenetrable veil, as if through the eyes of an ancient sibyl or an Andalusian sphinx.

—Edward F. Stanton (quoting Federico Garcia Lorca), Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1978)

page and stage

The perfect combination of page poet and stage poet.


[National Poetry Slam this week in St. Paul.]

make it now

Avant-gardists frequently mistake the word ‘new’ for a value descriptor when it is merely a temporal marker.

prime directive

If MFA programs in creative writing did nothing else creating life-long readers would be a worthy accomplishment.

no other words

As soon as a writer types the phrase ‘in other words’, he should immediately delete that phrase and the whole passage it referred to. One doesn’t translate within the language.

silken line

A poet often does more and better than he is aware at the time, and seems at last to know as little about it as a silkworm knows about the fineness of its thread.

—Walter Savage Landor, The Pentameron: and other imaginary conversations (1889)

what's in a name

If I could steal another poet’s name, I’d lift Walter Savage Landor. Just saying that name makes me feel like I'm about to write a major poem.

shape in space

A poem should have a physique, an armature; it should cut a figure.

intransigent matter

A poet intent on breaking down the most unpoetic material: To yield gold from the least promising ore, in that way the poet is not unlike the alchemist working with intransigent matter.

live free or die

Full-time poets live for free residencies: A long-term house sit or caretaker position, an artist colony invitation, all ideal. But even a squat in an abandoned building will do in a pinch.

selfish sin

The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation—and even a sin—in realm of art.

—Carl Gustav Jung, “The Poet”

verse tweezers

A couplet: verse tweezers used to present an image or a thought held in its squeeze of rhyme.

word museum

Already the poem was becoming a word museum.

no box for that

It seems a thing must first have a category before it can be criticized.

rogue editors

Breaking News [July 21, 2010]: Rogue poetry editors at The Paris Review accepted scads of hideously unpublishable poems. So much bad poetry was accepted that a replacement editor and turnaround specialist known as “Chainsaw Robyn” had to be called in to clean up the mess. One assistant editor at The Paris Review was reported to have said, “It’s just scandalous; I can’t find a single poem by one of my friends among these previously accepted submissions.”

by rights justify

A prose poem justifies itself by resorting to the right margin.

hot hand

A good poem is perhaps just a winning streak of lines.

image of note

                  Then is blown,
Cooling the air with shaded petal-waves,
The great sound-blossom of a temple bell.

—Mary McNeil Fenollosa (1865-1954), “Midsummer in Tokio," Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses (Little, Brown, 1899)

flip turn

Constraint of the verse line: With each flip-turn, a swimmer gains power pushing off from the pool wall.

hand built

Quote found today at the Ken Matsuzaki exhibit at Pucker Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston:

I spent twenty years throwing on the wheel, but eventually I left it to hand-build, one-by-one, the forms I had in my heart. I began to think that it was important to first know what I wanted to make and only then worry about developing the techniques by which to achieve it.

—Ken Matsuzaki, Burning Tradition: Ceramics by Ken Matsuzaki, exhibit catalogue Pucker Gallery in Boston, June 2008, translated by Andrew L. Maske

more than nine

Poetry has been killed so many times it has passed cats for number of lives.

better not best

Her poetry wasn’t hard to like; but it was difficult to admire. [Thinking of Kay Ryan]

poetic leap

The poet must not cross an interval with a step when he can cross it with a leap.

—Joseph Joubert, Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts, trans. by Katharine Lyttelton, quoted in The World in a Phrase (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005) by James Geary

word farm

Poet, be a word farmer.

stylist on ice

A great stylist must have a substantive substrate. It’s not thin ice upon which she carves those elaborate figures, executes those flawless axels.

birds of a feather

An exultation of skylarks, a murder of crows, a workshop of poets…

floating window

The lyric is a floating window at large in the world, stopping here or there long enough to frame a scene, to allow a certain action to unfold within its constrained vista.

immovable attitude

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

—Anaïs Nin, August 22, 1936, Fire: From "A Journal of Love, " The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (Mariner Books, 1996)

new old poet laureate

When the famous poet got the call from the Library of Congress, he said something like, "You know I'm honored to be asked. But you also know I've gotten pretty much every prize and award that matters in my long career. You need to pick somebody a generation or two younger than me. Might I suggest these worthy poets______________."

Only a fantasy for how one could gracefully decline an honor one deserved but didn't need.

think again

I hear they’ve been ‘rethinking poetics’. I hope this isn’t going to be an annual event.

darwinian word

Emerson opined that words are ‘fossil poetry’. But the trick is to naturally select those Darwinian words which will manage to stay out of the fossil record.

te-hee to he-haw

His work provoked a wide range of emotion, from a slight smile to a full guffaw.

breakout book

A poet who believed one book would make all the difference.

backyard poetry

August 6, Saturday afternoon. A thunder storm in Brooklyn after days of heat and humidity. I lie on my bed enjoying it, noticing the rain running down the bark of the tree outside my window. Charles [Reznikoff] would have enjoyed that. Backyard poetry, he wrote a lot of it. Backyard but not sentimental: the trees, the bark, the oblong light in the darkness scrupulously observed. That is what the Objectivists had in common. (Though Charles once told me that all they had in common when they first met was the state of being unpublished and an admiration for the dos and don’ts that Ezra Pound was publishing in Poetry magazine.)

—Harvey Shapiro, “Remembering Charles Reznikoff,” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation, 1984) edited by Milton Hindus

crafted carelessness

One felt a crafted carelessness that made it difficult to surrender to those odd collocations of imagery and outright tonal collisions.

vuvuzelas

People may have a differing opinions about these simple instruments that turn a football stadium into a hive of sound, but there is hardly a word more fun to say than ‘vuvuzelas’, and hardly a better one-word poem during this time of the FIFA World Cup.

by net or gaff

You’re gonna need a net or gaff to land that last line.

always fashion fails

It took only a decade for ‘impure forms’ to begin to bore.

attack syntax

A syntax that will not impede the speed of thought.

center will not hold

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, "On Painting," The Cubist Painters (1913)

all for one

Let’s all be avant-garde together.

broken wing

Each line flopped over like a broken wing, as the poem kept trying to fly.

mental matter

To a conceptualist it’s not about the act/art; it’s about the thinking about the act/art.

blurb substitute

Instead of blurbs, print this on the back of the book: “What are you looking for back here? Embarrassingly extravagant endorsements, conviviality, cronyism? Crack open the book and read a couple poems.”

no return point

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

—Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (Schocken Books, 2006), translated by Michael Hofmann

breed

Writing that breeds readers.

horizonline

A linebreak like the horizon is a visual illusion, yet becomes important aurally.

old maps

They come to poetry expecting much. And for a time language itself delivers all: They write some good poems, garner a little attention; a few poems accepted for journals, a chapbook, perhaps a full collection comes out. They are ours in ars poetica. But then the disappointments begin to mount. The taste of success is found to be exactly that. And they are gone, faded back into the general populace, with a few poems tucked away in a folder somewhere, old maps from their travels through the unforgiving country called poetry.

woven basket

Line after line the poem intricately woven of sound and rhetoric, a beautiful basket that could hold anything or nothing at all.

well ordered

A semantic Mandarin, in his poems all the words knew their place in the household.

plainsong

If, according to an old saying, it is a fact that the aim and the nature and even the essence of true art is its suitability (caput artis decere) then indeed Gregorian art takes first place—one unique and noble thought is expressed in the form which is most appropriate and most adequate to the thought itself. But there is more to it: over and above this first quality of suitability, we discover others of broader and higher significance. It soon becomes evident that this form of art, far more than any other, is impregnated, saturated, with truth itself, and that falsehood, or even fiction and vain pretense, are foreign to it and have no place in it. And so the circle of perfect requirements is complete, and in a perhaps unique combination the true, the beautiful and the good meet, and this sublime trinity, which is absent from so many works of art—not excluding the greatest—becomes a living reality in a chapel where humble monks sing and pray on their knees.

—Camille Bellaigue ,“Le Chant Grégorian à l’Abbaye de Solesmes”
Les Epoques de la Musique (Delagrave, 1909)

comfortable bubble

A reader who never ventured out of the comfortable bubble of the contemporary.

luddite moment

With all the talk about how new technologies (twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube, ebooks, podcasts, etc.) are changing poetry, I can’t help but think that perhaps poetry’s future may be better served by delivering poems via carrier pigeons and bottles tossed into the sea.

word dreamed before

Every word ought to be dreamed
before becoming poem.

—Roberto Juarroz, opening lines of “Tenth.12,” Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems, translated by Mary Crow (White Pine Press, 1992)

beast and pest

The critic’s minor biting at a major poet’s work reminded me of a fly at the ear of a water buffalo. The beast flicks its ear once and while, but is otherwise untroubled by this fly. [re: David Orr on Robert Hass' The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems in The New York Times Book Review, May 2010]

dictation

Pound, being too ready with a dictum, may have betrayed some of the dictator within him.

rewritten in realtime

I woke from the dream of the poem and rewrote it in language of the real.

pardon my french

Glad I don’t have to do artist shit all the time.

radiant sightlines

The poem as an exploded panopticon.

less a thing

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it...Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

—Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Human Condition (1958)

collective cry

In the readers arose a collective cri de Coeur.

just two more

In [American] football games they have a two-minute warning. At readings the poet will often give the audience the ‘just two more’ warning.

magna cum libri

He was a graduate of that shabby academy called a used bookshop.

armor plated

The poem was beyond opaque; the lines like overlapping armor plates.

low dose

Prose poetry: low-dose prose.

rather than

I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as “interesting,” conventional rather than “designed,” accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non-sequitur and proclaim the duality.

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to “either-or.”

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

stray birds

A couple of days ago I found a copy of Tagore’s Stray Birds in a bin at the grocery store. Cost: 25 cents.


(n.b.: this two-bits was written a few years ago, but I post it today to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore.)

troubled sleep

Artists should be anxious about their art. The worst artists sleep like babies content with whatever marks they’ve made.

state of the art

Reading audience at a local college: Several faculty from the English Department, two dozen of their students impressed into attendance. Locals: me.

suffocating title

Your title was so apt and explanatory, it was like a pillow smothering the poem lying in its bed.

reading material

“Nice bibliography.”: Inadvertent insult to an academic book.