trick of the trade

Set out only a few chairs for the poetry reading. This will condense the audience into a tight cluster, and if more chairs must be set up before the start of the reading, it will feel like an overflow event.

until the name alone would suffice

The length of a poet’s bio is in inverse relationship to the size of her/his reputation.

exit solo

Sad as it is to say, a great poet of love is dying alone. [Berkeley, CA]

empty cage

The poem was a finely constructed cage, but the door was unclasped and the bird within had flown.

spaces between

What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.

—Max Frisch

(Quote encountered in Marco Breuer's Line of Sight installation at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.)

standing room only

Even though they are comfortably seated, one should read to his/her audience as though they were being forced to stand for the entire proceeding.

allegience at large

The poem as a flag for no nation.

supply-side economics

Often it seems we are producing more & more poetry books (in print & digital media) yet we’re failing to increase readership for this mass of material.

from poetry expect poetry

How little divides us finally from Longinus and his classic work on the sublime, written in the early years of our era. The literary encyclopedia reminds us that the sublime is not a formal feature of a work and can’t be defined by way of rhetorical categories. It is instead “a spark that leaps from the soul of the writer to the soul of the reader.” Has so much really changed? Don’t we still wait greedily for that spark?

Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes. These worthy qualities and forms perform splendidly in their proper place—in an essay, a scholarly tract, a broadside in an opposition newspaper. In poetry, though, we seek the vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry.

—Adam Zagajewski, title essay, A Defense of Ardor (FSG, 2002), translated by Clare Cavanaugh

palace or cell

Being locked inside one language, I’m glad that English is a sprawling palace, its rooms furnished with things collected from many nations, and not a small prison cell, spare and well-swept.

framed for attention

Art begins by framing for attention. The framing can be physical of course, as in the traditional picture frame or mural, or in sculpture the negative space around the object provides a frame, or the art may be framed in the sense of being captured on film/video, or it may be framed by the venue in which it takes place as in installation art or performance art, even landscape/cityscape art is framed for presentation to a random passer-by. Art that is framed asks for and awaits our attention, which is to say it seeks audience, however small or insular, and ultimately art, thus framed, seeks appreciation. And it is appreciation, by even a small group, that closes the circle and makes art of what was proffered by the framing.

as in chess

Will the first line be a quiet opening or a gambit?

landmarks in passing

A critic who was like a literary tour guide; a bit too glib when more glamour was called for.

no inert fact

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne (The Free Press, 1978, p. 310), lecture delivered in 1927.

rhetorical question

Why not write about the rhombus?

for want of form

When the words came pouring out of him, for want of form, he grasped for cups, buckets & pans.

dead poet pinned down

It won’t be long before the annotated Bukowski is released.

another monsterpiece

Too many who haven’t the content or the temperament for the task, think to be a major poet means they must write a poem of epic length.

with nothing to bring

if representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.

—Clive Bell, Art (Oxford U. Press, 1987, p. 25)

[Of course, one might ask, "What choice have we? It's not as though we can set aside all prior experience before we address a work of art."]

unexpected delight

When reading a book in a field far removed from poetry, I often begin by flipping to the index to see if there are any references to the word ‘poet’ or ‘poetry’. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised.

the x-ray and the acetylene torch

Criticism is analytic; while theory is synthetic.

waste land the sequel

“The Waste Land 2” was not quite as compelling. It borrowed some of the glory but lacked the energy of the original.

[See iPad app]

This just in: Many who downloaded the app complained to Apple when they realized "The Waste Land" was not a video game in which zombies and alien lifeforms could be blasted into colorful pixels.

translation machine

Always the same handful of poets are translated again & again: How many Rilkes, Lorcas, Rimbauds, etc., do we need?

[Thinking of Ashbery's recent Rimbaud]

outside in

Only when the outside is in us can it start to become material for the poem. But again, this is only a beginning, because the outside world enters everyone and not only into poets, and within each of us is that same labyrinth of paths, of which few are taken, often the same ones.

—Joan Margarit, New Letters to a Young Poet (Swan Isle Press, 2011), translated by Christopher Maurer

overmediated

A poem of many plies of mediation.

severed vitals

Lines cut from its middle, an act of harakiri for the poem, and it was like the whole body folded over and collapsed.

cat people

Poets living with house cats always invoking lions.

nail driven

Fear of the period; its finality, that last nail driven.

god knows

When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.

—Robert Browning, as quoted by G. K. Chesterton in his biography Robert Browning (MacMillan, 1903)

communiqués of the insomniac

In the morning at the café I noticed someone’s finger had traced a text, perhaps a poem, on the dew-covered tabletop.

tested by the text

A reader of poetry is a serious and savvy character; has to be.

thread or read

Breaking the block: Read until you find a thread. Better yet, read until your head explodes.

wide-eyed

Poetic image: That thing which would go unnoticed except to an untrained eye.

lily light

    Light lily lily light light lily light

    Imagically
    Lightli ly

    Outline stones for the wind

    All creatures come
    To mind to oneness

Light first and last, and lilies and lights along the way. The alleyway, in just that way and just that order, pleasured my eyes. Of course it was a happiness to say. “Only the lull I like” wrote Whitman. If I can see it, it must be moving; and when I see it, I am moving too. The lull is not a pause. The lull is an ensemble underway, and as I found, anything I might say would be an adverb. [157]

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

pulper

One of those literary degenerates still hooked on the paper book.

not for nothing said

The poem as an expression of consequence.

bookcase or box

This is not a book for my bookcase, but for the box to be donated to a local booksale.

poet-jockey

You could say about the poem’s ending that which too often occurs at a steeplechase race: The horse fell at the last fence.

not as an acrobat

Rexroth calls an "anthropological religion" the basis for his poetry. He has written that the anthropologist Edward Sapir was “the only person I have ever met who thoroughly understood what I dreamed of doing with poetry. Out of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics he had developed a kind of philosophy of interpersonal communion and communication.” Certainly there is a striking resemblance between Rexroth’s thought and that of Sapir, who, for example,…thought that the best poetic style “allows the artist’s personality to be as a presence, not as an acrobat,” because such artists fit “their deep intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech” rather than weave “a private technical art fabric of their own.”

—Morgan Gibson, Kenneth Rexroth (Twayne Publishers, 1972)

(Edward Sapir’s words quoted from Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921)

emotional leakage

Only the relatively simple forms (e.g., sonnet, villanelle) can be vessels for our psychic impulses. They retain the lyric aspect. While elaborate forms (crown of sonnets, sestina, etc.) leak emotion in direct proportion to the complexity of their structure.

responding in kind

Each reader answers the poem according to his/her own nature. (after Confucius)

solo style

The mark of a great poet is that the work is such that it cannot set off a style. Some may imitate its most superficial aspects, but the work begins and ends with that poet.

new poet laureate

On May 11, 2011, by proclamation, I was appointed to the honorary position of ‘Poet Laureate of the Town of West Hartford’ (CT). This being my official report of my first week on the job—

I asked the Town Council to annex the City of Hartford (which has no poet laureate) so that my realm might be expanded. [Declined]

I asked that a tiara of emeralds be crafted in the model of a laurel wreath, or, if funds were not available for such jewelry, that fresh laurels could be delivered to my house each week, so that my headdress will always be fresh & green as I go about town reciting poetry to the populace. [Declined]

I asked that a small area in the town library be designated as “Poet’s Corner,” and that this area should be appointed with a lounge chair of Danish design, reserved for my person, and in which I will, from time to time, ensconce myself, so that I may read or write as the spirit moves me, and should I be in need of refreshment, a member of the library staff would be given leave to bring me a Starbucks’ latte. [Declined]

Undeterred by these setbacks, I am determined to dispatch my duties with dignity and panache.

prompt and circumstance

A poetry writing prompt: A word game designed to draw out bad poetry that would otherwise arise by natural means.

blank look

In this poem the blank spaces are just empty space.

individual, intelligible, inner need

The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art.

—Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?" (translation by Alymer Maude, 1899)

stiff competition

It was a warm spring evening, the door was propped open behind the speaker at the poetry reading, and throughout her reading birds could be heard singing in the background.

word horde

A poet who was obviously a word collector.

that once were lives

All those poems locked away in unread books: silent graves.

steinian query or proposition

Poetry or prose or prose or poetry or poetry or prose.

not meteorological facts

The aim of a lyric poem in which occur the words ‘sunshine’ and ‘clouds,’ is not to inform us of certain meteorological facts, but to express certain feelings of the poet and to excite similar feelings in us. A lyric poem has no assertional sense, no theoretical sense, it does not contain knowledge.

—Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (lectures delivered at the University of London, 1934)

said but not read

At the poetry reading he said very intelligent and interesting things before each poem. But when a poem was read: "That's it? That's the whole thing?"

--
I once heard Joseph Langland recount a student reading he attended (at Amherst?) when Robert Frost was in the audience: A young fellow came to the podium and gave an elaborate explanation of the poem he was about to read. Then the young poet read his rather short poem. Frost piped up: "Young man, you said a better poem than you read."

critical scope

Be a critic possessed of a capacious poetics.

memoir broken into lines

Apparently you believe your narrative history merits my attention, but I come to poetry for more than memoir broken into lines.

not easy beauty

One will tell me, perhaps, that there are great beauties which make themselves felt to everyone; for example, those that one calls particularly the beauties of sentiment. I reply first that, although everybody feels certain beauties, not everybody feels them equally. Secondly, there are a great many beauties, and some of them the highest, which are only felt by persons of great intellectual accomplishment. As for the sentiments, they are accessible to everybody only when they are simple and simply expressed. If they are a bit composite, or rendered with finesse and elegance, they escape the multitude, and sometimes they even appear to them to be false.

—l’Abbé N. C. J. Trublet, Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale (Amsterdam, 1755), quoted in The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1971) by Francis X. J. Coleman

requisite forms

Fixed forms for those who need them.

inside and out

A poetry insider is a society outsider.

skinny volumes

Because I’m a poet, I have read many thin books and a few big fat ones.

not going anywhere

Critic-proof: the words impervious and entirely set in their ways.

absolute and mortal

Poetry

Its nature is to look
                               both absolute and mortal
as if a boy had passed through
or the imprint of his foot
                                        had been preserved
unchanged
                   under the ash of Herculaneum.

—Carl Rakosi, The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi (National Poetry Foundation, 1986), p. 186

where did that come from

An anomalous element that comes to define the poem.

standing stones

Sometimes I see headstones standing in cemeteries and they remind me of books displayed in bookstore windows.

a dolphin swims under a rainbow

the haiku journal editor
openly admits his bias against
'dolphins' and 'rainbows'

speak for themselves

As we say in a hand of poker, ‘the cards speak for themselves’, and so it should be with a poem, the words should speak for themselves.

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