imperial interference

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, or personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Bashô said, “Learn of a pine from a pine.” Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Bashô meant. This avoidance of metaphor or simile arises, I feel, from the poet’s need to render directly and concretely the vision he has had, and only that vision. Almost he seems to aim at the paring down of his medium to the absolute minimum, so that the least words stand between the reader and the experience! The result can be what Babette Deutsch has called a “naked poem” as she noted in speaking of the art of William Carlos Williams: “Not merely rhyme and metre but sometimes metaphor itself became an imperial interference between him and the sun.”

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Chas. L. Tuttle & Co, 1957)

big box

A prose poem: big box o’ words.

lashing the unruly waters

Those lines of poetry lashing forth with great fury. The poet like Xerxes having the Hellespont whipped with chains, to no avail.

edgy performance

He was so avant-garde he went straight to the edge of the proscenium and fell off the stage into the crowd.

sleepy head

Those first few lines were still wiping the sleep from their eyes.

writing thaw

It was wonderfully warm & pleasant & the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home—I felt the winter breaking up in me & if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.

—Henry David Thoreau, manuscript volume 18 of the Journals

stepping stones

A critic walks on the backs of writers across the waters of discourse.

heroic couplets

Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?

idols of the lexicon

Avoid all false idols, like words.

don't look back

A line so good the one that followed was looking over its shoulder.

moral compass

“I can’t imagine an immoral person bothering with poetry," [Lucien Stryk] shoots back, “and by ‘immoral,’ I’m not talking about trivialities. I mean in the largest sense, in the way the person relates to the world, his spirit. In the poets that affect me, there is always that element of desire and hope.”

I thirsted for seasons,
dragging a leaden shadow
into nothingness. Now,

as fire meets ice, I see.

[from “Lake Down”]

—Lucien Stryk, quoted by Susan Porterfield in “Poetry and Lentil Soup: A Profile of Lucien Stryk,” the afterword of Where We Are: Selected Poems and Zen Translations (Skoob Books, LTD, London, 1997) by Lucien Stryk

obscure science

The science in the poem was used superficially as metaphor; which is to say that only a handful of people in the world could understand the underlying concept. So it is that the obscurity of the poet is the obscurity of the scientist.

document runner

Poet, be a courier to eternity.

mind music

Only semantic connection can create the ‘music of thought’.

unsure reader

Some poets read their poems flawlessly, with gusto and verve. Others read with hesitancy and uncertainty, stumbling over words, as though the poem was still composing itself. I respect the poet who reads with suspicion of what has been written.

highest ideality

[T]he function of poetry, like that of science, can only be fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. As the chance note that comes to be supported by a melody becomes in that melody determinate and necessary, and as the melody, when woven into a harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed beyond recall; so the single emotion, the fortuitous dream, launched by the poet into the world of recognizable and immortal forms, looks in that world for its ideal supports and affinities. It must find them or else be blown back among the ghosts. The highest ideality is the comprehension of the real. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience which we have actually had.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), edited by Lee A. Jacobus

mind weld

The psychic acetylene that fuses one thing to another.

surrounding material

Generally there is a third more material than is needed in the first draft. Think of a model airplane kit: The wing, once separated from the surrounding material, is all the wing needed to lift the aircraft.

all bow down

The sovereign line.

aggregating grandeur

A parade, a pageant, a triumph, as the poem proceeded.

real relationship

Classified ad for print-on-demand (POD) poetry book: “Lonely file in cyberspace seeks physical relationship with illusory reader.”

emphasis needed

[Hopkins’] inventiveness worked…in the main line which the adjectival poets had established. Keats’s carved, wing’d, hid, faded, unseen, moss’d, became Hopkins’ carved, winged, dogged, cursed, freckled, fetched, plumed, in all a somewhat rarer lot; and Keats’s eager-eyed, hot-blooded, half-anguished, deep-delved, purple-stained, wild-ridged, became Hopkins’ more complicated and special carrier-witted, scroll-leaved, whirl-wind-swivelled, else-minded, heart-forsook, care-coiled, bell-swarmed, dapple-dawn-drawn, no-man-fathomed, five-lived, rarest-veined. The change is not one, as far as I can see, toward greater metaphysical farfetchedness but rather is an intensification of quality statement, an emphasis on the special perceivable nature of things, the physical sense of whirlwind, leaf, care, bell qualities. Emphasis is just what Hopkins said, in his early essay on “Poetic Diction,” the accented past participle is good for. Poetry needs more emphasis of all sorts he said there, more 18th Century liveliness, more 19th Century vividness to make mere flat “Parnassian” descriptiveness come alive.
[…]
Hopkins, like Ruskin, was a notebook sketcher and painter, by nature as by convention a wordpainter. When he was in a hurry and had little to say of the day that was closing, if it were fine he often wrote Fine in his Journal, but often Bright.

—Josephine Miles, “The Sweet and Lovely Language,” Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Kenyon Critics (New Directions, 1945)

not utilitarian

Poetry as impractical language.

music and muscle

It was a poem with many tongue holds.

humble thing

Poet, be proud of that humble thing you have made from the poor material we call language.

blood trail

A poem that left a blood trail back to the poet.

close sailing

You cannot say it all, in poetry. Where you cannot say it all, you are stinted irremediably in how seriously you can speak. There is that something of lightness in the poetic presentation of themes, be they of the uttermost of inspiring seriousness. The verbal versatility that bejewels the process of poem-making, by requisition, produces an almost continual close sailing to the wind of word-play. The use of metaphor, its tempting relief to the mind so often at a loss for the immediate right provision for the fixed, patterned, poetic word-course, becomes a chronic virtue of permitted caprice of statement.

—Laura (Riding) Jackson, ”Reading for the University of Florida Library (1975),” from “The Failure of Poetry: Selection from the Manuscripts,” edited by John Nolan (Chelsea #69, 2000).

not a matter of modulation

A poem that could be whispered just as well as shouted.

duly noted

By the novelty of his work, the poet had secured for himself a footnote in any overview of literature of the times. For some poets, I’m afraid, that’s all they aspire to.

traveling call

If one could be called for ‘traveling’ in metrical poetry, he would have been called for steps.

low bar

Of all the arts, poetry has the least barrier to entry, which is part of its attraction. One of the problems with poetry is that the barrier to entry is so low.

telltale childlike qualities

“Like a woman,” said Rilke, without fearing that the comparison would demean him. He has been called the poet of the child and the woman. He understood us better than the sensualists. It has been said that he who gets too close to an object ceases to see it. The memory of his own childhood helped him to love children. Does not the hardening that ruins us come when we forget this? Rilke remembered the child with marvelous tenderness, and this freed him from the monstrous condition of being entirely adult, absolute man or woman, without the golden fringe of telltale childlike qualities, without the elvish sands of a five-year old explorer swirling in the chambers of an old heart.

—Gabriela Mistral, “An Invitation to the Work of Rainer Maria Rilke”, A Gabriela Mistral Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti and edited by Marjorie Agosin

uncommon speech

The poem as the spectacular vernacular.

cover up

Poems are not buttressed for being pressed between glossy covers.

sound sleeper

Inured by clamor and din, sometimes it is the nearly silent things that startle and wake us.

no things but in ideas

Mallarmé famously admonished Degas by saying that poems are not made of ideas, they are made of words. In turn the conceptualists have refuted Mallarmé by making poems out of ideas.

sign of the times

The young poet came up to the open mike holding nothing. At first I thought she must be a slam poet who had committed her work to memory. Then she took out her iphone/droid and she started reading from the device.

obedience not invention

Now I believe that much of the work on the poem called “Ghost Ship” amounted to obedience, not invention: obedience, that is, to the preexistent poetry of the ordinary word. To cure—to have a care for—poetry is to keep its elements, the words on the tongue, the symbols of our acts, alive—by suspicion, and attention.

—Mary Kinzie, "The Cure of Poetry," The Cure of Poetry in the Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling (U. of Chicago Press, 1993)

chin up

A first line so strong that one can feel the whole poem straining to get its chin up over the bar.

make your mark

After the reading, the poet was asked to sign a copy of his book, the remainder mark clearly visible along the edge of its pages.

lazy man's load

The line was trying to carry a ‘lazy man’s load’ of allusions.

ingredients label

I’m in favor a federal legislation mandating an Ingredients Label on the back of all poetry books in lieu of blurbs. The most frequently used words could be listed: ‘Moon: 13; Cow: 11; Grass: 8; Light: 6; all others 5 or less instances'. And each text would be analyzed for content: ‘Poeticisms: 14%; Imagery: 11%; Tropes: 7%; Internal Rhyme: 2.7% ; and other rhetorical or quasi-poetic matter and filler'.

closed to some

So many poems are shaped like doors; and some really are.

poetry in its own way

I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which a critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.

—George Saintsbury, “Eighteenth Century Poetry,” A Saintsbury Miscellany (Oxford U. Press, 1947)

valentine

Poetry books are made thin so you can slip one under your true love’s door.

never enough

Why are so many poets unhappy with poetry?

everything possible

Novices: new voices, no vices.

voices carry

The human voice will carry any poem a little farther than its text.

summons to the mountain

Let the canon come to me.

sacrilege change

[Charles] Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

my odd book club

Being a book reader and not a collector, I have never minded that readers before me have marked the pages. As long as they are not too demonstrative, to the point of occluding the text, with their underlinings, checkmarks and margin notes, then I’m happy to have shared a book with other minds, some still living and others long dead.

memory or imagination

Poetry torn/born between the urge to memorialize and the desire to imagine.

theory poets

Those theory people who have infiltrated poetry without the ability to feel.

more or less clearly

Robinson will not say anything in such a way as to make the responsibility for choice his own rather than the reader’s. He will simply render the situation and leave us to judge it, for all of Robinson’s poems presuppose an outside world of critics and judges, of ourselves, people who see and observe more or less clearly.

—Louis A. Coxe, “E. A. Robinson: The Lost Tradition,” Appreciation of E. A. Robinson (Colby College Press, 1969)

now what

You get credit for getting there first. But then one must find a way forward.

protective structure

A poem so obviously structured it was like receiving a gift still in its crate.

closed in upon

Was that a close reading or a closed reading of the poem?

different readers, alternate lines

Reading his commonplace book, I discovered we had read many of the same books, yet lines he had chosen to quote I’d passed over without notice.

substition of terms: two bricks, two words

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (New York Herald Tribune, 28 Jun 1959)

Poetry starts when you carefully put two words together. There it begins.

just nubs

The stunted lines.

inspired listening

One can entertain any beliefs one likes with regard to the sources of poetry, but whether it is God-given, daemonically inspired or willed by self, one has to be a poet before one can write poetry; if one is not a poet one merely entertains these beliefs and nothing more. Whether one deals with religious or poetic inspiration, with Grace or with any other manifestation of extraordinary power, ‘the spirit bloweth where it listeth’, and in order to hear, one must be capable of listening and of attention.

—Joseph Chiari, Realism and Imagination (Barrie & Rockliff. London. 1966)

this then and not that

A poet who unfailingly knew what to say and when to say it, and most of all what should be left unsaid.

kayak tongue

Let your kayak tongue drop into the rapids of speech.

buoyed on the great body

Is it that from the great ocean of the oeuvre a few canonical poems float to the top, or is it that a great body of work will buoy a few poems that we hold on to?

from on high

It wasn’t just inspiration, it was a download from heaven.

bring a heavy thing

poetry

i know

i can bring

every heavy thing

here


—Mairéad Byrne (originally posted to her blog Heaven on 6-1-2008)

blinds drawn

Ruled paper: That window with the blinds drawn.

unhurried hand

It was the kind of poem one felt had been written in pen, in longhand.

desciption's diminishing returns

With detail and description there is always the law of diminishing returns: At a certain point the language becomes an intricate, often beautiful, damask that occludes all beneath its surface.

we have a runner

Why are you writing like you’re running away from yourself?

inner and then more

All great poems...by the way they colonize and amplify and enhance the music of our own inner voices, of consciousness and conscience, ask us to be greater than we are, and if we read them well even show us how to begin.

—C. K. Williams, On Whitman (Princeton U. Press, 2010)

well layered language

A sonnet of fourteen-ply strength.

mindlocked

The poem you had in mind must often remain there.

not there at first glance

To shape the universal theme into a particular form (case) that one will not at first recognize, but will come to realize upon reflection.

pastoral not paradisal

The kind of pastoral poetry in which one might come upon some shotgun shells lying in the grass.