central planet

The unique domination of literature over life, and of one man over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognized, the work of Belinsky and his disciples, who first saw in Pushkin the central planet, the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and, in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful, and whimsical man, thought this embarrassing and spoke of the angular and unfashionable Belinsky as ‘a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to adore me’.

—Isaiah Berlin, “Vissarion Belinsky”, Russian Thinkers (Penguin, 2008)

quote freely

I distrust a review that quotes too sparingly from the book. I know ‘fair use’ is an issue, but the reviewer should err on the side of overly ‘free use’.

felix and oscar

Merrill and Olson share a beach house on The Cape.

end and beginning

The poem ends just when you were beginning to understand it.

gun start

A poet should spend as much time and care on the first line as a sprinter spends positioning his body and placing his feet in the starting blocks.

fire to fire

From The Fire of Alexandria to the Kindle Fire, the book survives.

biographically light

I am not writing my autobiography…I think that only heroes deserve a real biography, but that the history of a poet is not to be presented in such a form. One would have to collect such a biography from unessentials.

—Boris Pasternak, quoted in Themes and Variations in Pasternak’s Poetics (The Peter De Ridder Press, 1975) by Krystyna Pomorska

sign of the times

Passing the Crate & Barrel, I noticed in the window display there was a bookcase full of books but all the spines were turned to the inside, so you could read no titles. All you could see were the blank vertical edges of the bindings and pages facing outward. A decorative choice at end of the age of the physical book?

twisted types

Engaging in a little genre gerrymandering, are we?

close company

If not an audience, the poet assembles a loyal cadre of readers.

antitactile

So much sculpture begs to be touched but when these things are placed in museums it’s hands off.

long, continuing process

In 1956, I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; and I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement—a rejection of the dominant critical idea that the poem’s text should be read as separate from the poet’s everyday life in the world. It was a declaration that placed poetry in a historical continuity, not above or outside history.

—Adrienne Rich, title essay of Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Norton, 1986)

gang of slang

Poet, be a ringleader of slang.

seek the source

You may inflect and refine your opinions from reviews, but form your opinions from the source text.

close relations

Words don’t seem to suffer from becoming inbred.

protective barrier

Perhaps the book’s blurbs were meant to serve as prophylactic criticism.

no favors

Poetry will not return your favors.

worlds and worlds

From the concepts of ‘emotion and scene’ and ‘spirit and tone’, Wang Kuo-wei derived his theory of ‘worlds’ in poetry. The term I have translated as ‘world’, ching-chieh, is itself a translation of the Sanskrit word visaya, which in Buddhist terminology means ‘sphere’ or ‘spiritual domain’. Wang Kuo-wei was not the first to apply it to poetry, but he was the first to use it systematically and to give it something like a definition:

     The ‘world’ does not refer to scenes and objects only; joy, anger, sadness, and happiness also form a world in a human heart. Therefore poetry that can describe true scenes and true emotions may be said to ‘have a world’; otherwise it may be said ‘not to have a world’.

This ‘world’ is in fact a fusion of emotion and scene, and the concept is obviously derived from Wang Fu-chih’s ‘emotion and scene’, though now given a new name. Wang Kuo-wei distinguishes those who ‘create worlds’ in poetry from those who only ‘describe’ them:

     There are some (poets) who create worlds, and others who describe worlds.

 —James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966)

reader perogative

If we had more spontaneous reading we’d need less obligatory reviewing.

revise or else

Editor rex.

easy pieces

Reviewing is cursory criticism.

tyrant title

The poem labored under the tyranny of its title.

viral verse

A poem published online could be said to have gone viral when it gets 50 clicks.

haunted importantly

I suppose there is something in my Scottish blood which distrusts the Baroque, feeling there is something vaguely dishonest in using structural devices for decorative purposes. But it is more importantly true that my reservations are because it is an approach that dotes on the surface—whereas my chief interest is focused on the interior of things. I enjoy surfaces, I delight in Italy, I find great pleasure in Veronese, but the Rembrandt self-portraits are far, far more important to me. As the Giotto Madonnas are more valuable than those of Raphael. I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.

Jack Gilbert, “Real Nouns,” 19 American Poets of the Golden Gate (Harcourt Brace, 1984)

[Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert released this week.]

voice carries

Voice, as an attribute, cannot be achieved by writing one or two poems. Voice pervades the body of work. Voice is style laced with recurring content and theme.

inexhaustible resource

Before the poem was in any way fixed in its original language, the translations of it began to multiply.

simply symbolic

I’m not saying your work is “Hallmarky” exactly, but I was able to do an adequate translation of your poem using only emoticons.

whose words are these

They are the coin of our tongue, but words cannot be owned.

unexpected turn

The poem turned down one of those alleys of the psyche where anything can happen.

masked man

Frost uses masks not to deflect the personal voice but to find one, or several. He speaks truthfully when speaking as someone else, when he can assume the otherness of a mask, looking through those eyeholes at the world. Tone, he notes, is how you take yourself, your stance toward the world; literally, it is your attitude. Paradoxically, it seems harder to speak as one’s self without the sustained practice of speaking as somebody else.

—Jay Parini, “The Personal Voice,” Why Poetry Matters (Yale Univ. Press, 2008)

word when ordered

A poet has a just-in-time inventory of words.

books and such

I went into a bookstore but couldn’t recognize any of the merchandise for sale therein.

gulf and gift

Art should begin with aspiration for perfect execution, but end with acceptance of the gift of what is given.

application checklist

I see you have three blurbs on the back of your book, just like the three letters of recommendation you needed to get into graduate school.

exploded limits

Poetry is the dance of truth among limits which are its occasion and which it explodes.

—Lewis Thompson, Fathomless Heart: The Spiritual and Philosophical Reflections of an English Poet-Sage (DharmaCafe Books/North Atlantic Books, 2011), edited with an introduction by Richard Lannoy

ever undefined

It is often cited that the root of the word poetry comes from the Greek term poïesis meaning “to make.” But make how? And make what? So much lies undisclosed in the concept of mere ‘making’.

testament not commentary

Only those who believe in poetry write the significant poems; the rest are writing a kind of poetic criticism/commentary in the form of a poem.

erotic entanglement

That poem had it going on, with its erotic Kama Sutra syntax.

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.