en plein air

A nature poem in which you could see sky behind the text.

inconspicuous and overlooked

Originally, the Japanese words “wabi” and “sabi” had quite different meanings. “Sabi” originally meant “chill,” “lean,” or “withered.” “Wabi” originally meant the misery of living alone in nature, away from society, and suggested a discouraged, dispirited, cheerless emotional state. Around the 14th century, the meanings of both words began to evolve in the direction of more positive aesthetic values. The self-imposed isolation and voluntary poverty of the hermit and ascetic came to be considered opportunities for spiritual richness. For the poetically inclined, this kind of life fostered an appreciation of the minor details of everyday life and insights into the beauty of the inconspicuous and overlooked aspects of nature. In turn, unprepossessing simplicity took on new meaning as the basis for a new, pure beauty.

—Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Impermanence Publishing, 2008)

unselfish reflection

A reflective poem that was not a mirror on the poet’s life.

meditative means

Meditation that doesn’t drift, meditation that directs and apprehends.

instructions

Be patient and observe. Wait and listen. Hold it and be still. Place it on your tongue. Then breathe in.

anachronistic turn

The kind of line break so fashionable back in the day, you thought you could hear the faint echo of a carriage return bell at the turn.

responding with poetry

Within the diaries…there will be occasional moments when one senses a contrast in moving from poem to prose to poem, but the contrast is surely no greater than that from aria to recitative to aria, and it is usually less. One reason for such smoothness of movement between different literary modes is that the Japanese are so given, or were so given, to responding with poetry that there is a naturalness and integrity in combining the modes. Another reason is that the diary prose itself, through art, shades off from fact at one side of the narrow margin to fiction on the other side. When art is made to seem natural, or when the actual is rendered into full art, the margin becomes less important than the achievement.

—Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (U. of California Press, 1969)

each one build one

A canon of your own.

low carb

The poem was almost all nouns. Digested like a high-protein diet.

dwelling places

A poem is made of dwell words.

and then came this

For any valid definition of poetry, wait awhile, and another poem will come along to disprove the case.

drama within narrative

Narrative subsumes drama; the story told in scenes, characters, and voices.

complex but easy to carry

The proof of poetry was, in [James Russell] Lowell's mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men's minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.

—Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club (Random House. 2003, p.34)

out there, up there

I knew his work was kind of dreamy but then he told me all his poems were in the cloud.

sound the leaves make

At times meaning is no more than a wind moving through the forest of the alphabet.

juggling act

In our best art, the organizing force and chaos are held in an uneasy counterbalance.

another book in the wall

The last scholar chained to a carrel amid the library stacks.

given to song

The poetry of Japan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interests of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters—is there any living thing not given to song? It is poetry which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors.

—Ki no Tsurayuki (868-945), the preface to Kokinshū
(quoted in The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, Princeton Univ. Press, 1985)

no provenance

I found an old poem in a file, but I couldn't recognize it as mine.

tightly wound

Little wind-up poem amuses for a moment, but quickly runs down, & abruptly stops.

singular statement

Willing to be measured as a poet on the merits of a single poem.

language engineers

Structural, mechanical, chemical, electrical,…poets are the engineers of the language.

complete equipment

The poet is a rebuilder of the imagination…And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony.

For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, in the first place, that he sing; that his voice be pure and well pitched, and that his numbers flow; then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with one another; he must be euphuistic, coloring his thoughts with many reflected lights of memory and suggestion, so that their harmony may be rich and profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be sensuous and free, that is, he must build up his world with the primary elements of experience, not with conventions of common sense or intelligence; he must draw the whole soul into his harmonies, even if in doing so he disintegrates the partial systemizations of experience made by abstract science in the categories of prose.

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

fewer yet whole

A poem that won’t be made smaller no matter if half its lines are deleted.

down to words

Because it’s made of such common material (our words), poetry survives (and even thrives) in the most dire and desperate of circumstances.

skin trade

You could not forgive that he said, “Beautiful cover,” about your book.

obscure constructs

Another guidebook chockfull of obscure constructs for one’s amusement.

nothing to it

A good critic must have the audacity to think he/she could have been the creator.

global airspace of poetry

Today I believe that with these eight indigent lines I had gained access to a hoary secret society. Without seeking official permission and empty-handed, I had entered an invisible institution, the global airspace of poetry—it was that simple. Besides, who could those permission-granting officials possibly have been? There was no more Parnassus, nor, far and wide, a brotherhood or bohème. I heard of a poetry scene for the first time when I enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin. That Prenzlauer Berg with its run-down buildings would later become my very own Montparnasse, my drab Salon des Indépendants, populated by similarly idealistic stragglers as I, was unplanned. The muses, I soon realized, while taking course at the local adult education center, were nothing but a worn-out Greek allegory. The line had long been disconnected; you might as well try reading your poems to the ladies at the municipal registry, or the tellers at the post office. No, no, there was no formal accreditation process. You had to begin from scratch, cut off from both the classical and the modern traditions, in the vacuum of a society that tolerated literature only as mouthpiece for ideology. Even if you couldn’t see yourself that way: You were the young barbarian who undertook to carry the burden of a discarded culture on his frail shoulders in defiance of all evolutionary logic.

—Durs Grünbein, The Vocation of Poetry (Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2010)

difficult fit

A poem yet to find its requisite reader.

basic need

To begin to think of your art as your shelter.

lapsed lines

Your prose poems shouldn’t be your poems that simply lapsed their lines.

rough rider of words

Poet, be cavalier with language.

ways and means

Though in conversation or a drinking bout, Edmund Smith was always jotting thoughts and images. But he completed little.

[…]

[Christopher] Smart, being in a madhouse and denied writing materials, wrote much of his verse, probably including the Song of David, with a key on the walls of his cell.

[…]

[William] Mickle, being a printer, often composed his verses directly into type without taking the trouble previously to put them into writing.

—Chard Powers Smith, Annals of the Poets (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935)

jutting signage

A marquee title if ever there was one.

from a small flame

That one word was the pilot light which ignited the poem.

something in reserve

Always keep one unwritten poem in the back of your mind.

wherever the end

The last lines of almost any poem, because they are the ending, will by default seem a grand summing up or a reaching for epiphany. Had the last few lines been anywhere else in the poem they’d be seen as much less portentous.

fragile construct

Too fragile for its flaws, perhaps you were wise not to revise the piece.

snowfield

Block: The page a snowfield, deep and unmarked to the far edge.

not a hill or a tree

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most the definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, 1977


[Quote encountered today at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM.]

finish it

The poem that wouldn’t give up on me.

first marks

No line is harder to write than the first line in a new notebook.

ko'd

Think of the crumpled poem as the creator’s fist going down swinging.

petting zoo

It was the kind of workshop that is more of a petting zoo for new poems.

step-ladders and demon-traps

Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at the true purposes seized only at the last moment—at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions—the tackle for scene-setting—the step-ladders, and demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of literary histrio.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846, 19th Century American Writers on Writing (Trinity U. Press, 2010) , edited by Brenda Wineapple

stand clear

Sometimes the content is so inherently poetic that all the poet must do is to keep the language from getting in the way of the telling.

no room for pseudonym

Put your name on a poem: The poem is your name.

ka-boom

Poet, detonate denotation!

house to house

Two weeks before Christmas, a group of poets went out ‘caroling’ their poems. Some doors were slammed, but many homes welcomed them.

come who may

An accidental audience is all the poet can hope for.

sharp rebound

Complex and subtle interests, which the mind spins for itself may occupy art and poetry or our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come back with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions—anger, desire, regret, pity, and fear; and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world—bare, abstract, fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has called the ‘glory of motion’. [99]

—Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

skyline features

A few poems in the book stood like skyscrapers against other low-rise structures.

through or over

As a medium or as the messenger are two ways the poet can carry out her/his social mission.

aphoristic aphrodisiac

The villanelle: a form made to order for the aphorist.

hop along

The meter felt a little off kilter; it was a line with a limp.

off the rails

When a poem is going too fast and is about to come off the rails (the line), let it.

writing jail

Joan Simon: …What’s ahead?

Jenny Holzer: Trying to write something again. I haven’t locked myself up recently. As soon as I finish the next round of public pieces—in Europe and the US—I have to go to writing jail.

Joan Simon: The artists that have fed into your thinking are an extremely diverse lot. Among the earliest is writer, artist and printer William Blake.

Jenny Holzer: When I read Songs of Innocence (1779-c. 1800), for the first time I was entirely convinced that there was good in the world, including people.

Joan Simon: And his illustrations?

Jenny Holzer: I liked the fact that Blake was able to have the text and images inhabit the same space.

Joan Simon: Was there any one poem in particular?

Jenny Holzer: There is a lamb poem with just one little sinister turn that mentions a neck.

Joan Simon: ‘Little Lamb / Here I am, / Come and lick, / My white neck.’

Jenny Holzer: That’s the one. Then from Songs of Experience:

     If thought is life
     And strength and breath
     And the want
     Of thought is death.

“Jenny Holzer and Joan Simon in Conversation, June 1997, New York”
pressPlay: contemporary artists in conversation (Phaidon Press, 2005)

good in a room

The sonnet is the right form for frustrated interior decorators.

nothing but now

In a poem the temporal collapses into the universal now.

if you build it

How to build an anthology truly representative of a century of poets/poetry:
  A. Pick your poets first; then select their best and most representative poems.
  B. Ordered by increasing level of difficulty, identify and select:
    1) Primary: Important figures of enduring reputation and influence. Generally speaking, they are already well-represented in other anthologies or critical histories of the century.
    2) Secondary: Though their reputations and influence may have waned considerably over the years, figures who were important during a period of time. They set off a trend / fashion that during a certain time (generally at least a decade) garnered much attention and critical interest.
    3) Comprehensive: (related to #2) Figures who are representative of a school/movement¸ however fleeting was its influence, which is important to filling out the entire picture of the century’s poetry.
    4) Corrective: Figures whose inclusion will help to correct a bias caused by a general lack of publishing opportunities and attention, resulting primarily from ignorance or neglect by the dominant cultural and critical powers.

Footnote: Don't be cheap and beg if you have to, but don't omit someone important (Ginsberg/Plath) due to steep reprint fees. Solicit donations from major organizations like The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, etc. You only have one chance to get it right.

dangerous business

Poet, be a sapper of the psyche.

fall left or right

Language is alive. For the poet, each word represents sounds and meaning; the music of meaning is shaped by words that fall left or right of a single word. Each word is an increment of the whole. Perhaps we are drawn to poetry because the language vibrates (is an action), and we seem to search still for a language that will keep us whole.

—Yusef Komunyakaa, “Kit & Caboodle,” The Eye of the Poet (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

slowly closing in

Each translation by virtue of its errors makes the next translation closer to right.

twist of phrase

And a very taxing syntax it was.

bad advice

The poet must avoid the kind of writing guidance that leads to composing competent prose.

otherwordly

Metaphor is the metaphysics of words.

good tailor

Like a good tailor who fashions a suit that fits one man (or even two) resplendently; and an overcoat that might suit two or three—thus for me might my poems be made ‘to fit’, in one case (or perhaps in two or three). This comparison is somewhat deprecatory (only in a superficial sense); but it is, I think, accurate and reassuring. If my poems do not fit in a general sense, then they fit in a particular sense. This is no small matter. Their truth is, in this fashion, guaranteed.

—C.P. Cavafy, Selected Prose Works (U. of Michigan Press, 2010), translated by Peter Jeffreys

means more

Meaning doesn’t wear out, it deepens and becomes more nuanced.

not known as poetry

It’s promising when at first a piece of writing is not recognized as being poetry.

not horizon but waterfall

The notion of ‘line’ in Chinese, Korean and Japanese poetry can’t be scanning a horizon, rather it must be watching a waterfall.

words at play

The poem was a sound playground.

leaning late

Last night was the 16th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash featuring Robert Pinsky reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

"The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm" was one of the poems Pinsky chose to discuss at length. Here are a few lines:

    The words were spoken as if there was no book,
    Except that the reader leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

follows no wave

The poem is oblivious to fashion.

skips a generation

In the era of word processing software, the poet faced with a protracted power outage reverts to longhand as though the machine age, represented by the typewriter, never happened.

(n.b.: on the fifth night without power.)