shift happens

After reading a great poem, something like a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ occurs within the mind. Once you have read the poem your thought patterns are forever altered, your psychic response to events is deflected in an entirely new direction. The page is turned utterly, irrecoverably, so to speak. You will never again be the person you were in the minutes, hours, days and years before you encountered that poem.

self-exiled

Plato would banish the poets from the ideal polis, but the worthy poets would have already exiled themselves, even if still living therein, from the mores and norms of that populace.

specific gravity

What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word’s specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk with an elevated state of mind.

[...]

[Marina Tsvetaeva] never has enough space: either in a poem or in prose. Even her most scholarly-sounding essays are always like elbows protruding from a small room. A poem is constructed on the principle of the complex sentence, prose consists of grammatical enjambments…

—Joseph Brodsky, “A Poet and Prose,” Less Than One: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986)

big thing in a small place

A big exuberant review in a small obscure journal.

difficult language

It may not be poetry’s difficulty that puts off some readers, rather it may be that most people don’t recognize poetry as an art because it uses only the simple means of language.

militant stanza

If a single stanza stands its ground, then perhaps the whole poem will hold the field.

ur-art

The wide application of the word ‘poetics’ to a variety of arts and across many human endeavors gives some credence to poetry’s claim on being the ur-art.

walls of sound

Poet, be a sound housebuilder.

poetry put on the spot

The poem [“We Are Seven”] also stages the transcription of voice that is poetry, lays it out in front of us so that we might count ourselves as implicated within its iteration. I think this is what Wordsworth wanted to achieve in the writing of poetry, and what led to his instruction to the poet in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that he descend from his supposed height and “express himself as other men express themselves.” It also suggests that the transcription of these words into poetry, or what might be called the work of figuration, in some strange way neuters the power of the figurative act; at least it sets up the uneasy thought that poetry may be unable to answer the need it speaks and shows. This is equivalent to the demand that poetry reveal or acknowledge its own power; to ask of poetry the source of that power given that the words from which it is made are nothing more than reflections, echoes, transcriptions.

—Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001, p. 116)

lockstep formalist

He was one of those formalists you could visualize dressed in a black uniform, a real GestaPo.

panlingual

Translation is possible because ‘poemness’, abstracted from the medium of a particular language, is a lingua franca that carries over and through race, nation, and time.

now what

The poem was a fine slideshow of images. But at the end it was as though someone couldn’t bring up the house lights, and as you sat there in the dark, you thought, “How appropriate.”

surprise poem

You pulled down the roller blind surprised to find a poem written on it.

figure / ground

Were there not a different aesthetic sensibility by which we could contrast our own, then how would we set our art apart? We can fight the background, but we shouldn’t wish it away. It is the necessary contrast, and we should respect it as such.

we recognize it

Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter’s success depends upon hitting his hearer’s intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it another way—at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universal Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never seem to condescend...
[…]
The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy, “it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, but so as we recognize it.

—Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pen name ‘Q’), “Poetry”

wayward words

A poet always ready to be led wayward by words.

wasting silence

I’ve heard it said that ‘architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully’. I don’t know who to attribute that remark to; though it may be a misquote of something Philip Johnson once said. In any case, it’s a wry remark and it makes me think that “Poetry is the art of wasting silence (or its material manifestation: the blank page) beautifully."

slog language

Long poem: a text of indeterminate length that will surely sorely try the most determined reader.

book that is a book

[I]t is inexact to speak of failure if we must qualify Mallarmé’s enterprise. A book that really would be a book: hidden beneath this seemingly tautological formula lies a true challenge, an outrageous demand, analogous with the infinite work or weaving, a demand that is always taken up again, which Proust took right into his death bed, “A book that really would be a book,” in one sense, is always impossible, for it would imply a “world that really would be a world,” a present that would be a present. The Book represents nothing other than that: “it is, the title of an interminable study and series of notes that I have here, under my hands, and which controls the deepest part of my soul,” as Mallarmé writes in a letter.

—Marc Froment-Meurice, Solitudes: from Rimbaud to Heidegger (State Univ. of New York Press, 1995) translated by Peter Walsh, foreword translated by Douglas Brick.

misdirection diction

When it came to reading the poem, the epigraph was an eloquent red herring.

sight impaired

His aesthetics developed like a cataract upon the eye; clouding, occluding, preventing him from seeing and recognizing real accomplishment by other modes.

well dry

Went to word well too often.

regard the strange

The foreign words stopped his eye and asked for due regard.

immortal form

Time stays, the canyon stays;
Their houses stay, split rock
Mortared with clay, and small.
And the shards, grey, plain or painted,
In the pale roseate dust reveal, conceal
The patterns of their days,
Speak of the pure form of the shattered pot.

We do not recreate, we rediscover
The immortal form, that, once created
Stands unchanged
In Time’s unchanging room.

—Janet Lewis, from “The Ancient Ones, Betátakin,” The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000)

More about Janet Lewis.

fame by such means

Early on he planned on becoming a famous poet. Oh well.

stopping place

By etymology a ‘stanza’ means stopping place. So think twice before you go on with the poem from there.

self-enveloping space

This is all you need to know about the artist: Only her work hung on the walls of her home.

know enough to explain

A poet who had the audacity to speak about his creative process, even though he only dimly understood what was happening.

tempted by philosophy

The great danger which threatens us, poets tempted by philosophy, is that we should be drawn into explaining our aims instead of writing our work. Criticism judges us on our aphorisms, and not on our poems. We have been contaminated by German philosophy, saturated with commentaries on Hölderlin, and I need not so much as mention our familiarity with the pre-Socratics.

—Pierre Emmanuel, “Lines of Force in French Poetry,” lecture delivered March 1959 at the Library of Congress, collected in Literary Lectures (Library of Congress, 1973).

critical translation

With so much choice and bias in the process, translation becomes a form of criticism.

standing stone

The poem as standing stone amid the open field.

as if thief

The poet is the thief of neglected and undervalued things.

long not whole

If only one long poem was a poem whole.

less distracted

Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience. It is true that it concentrates practically exclusively on this function. The poetry of other peoples usually serves other functions too, some of them not particularly germane to the poetic experience. It is possible to claim that Japanese poetry is purer, more essentially poetic. Certainly it is less distracted by non-poetic considerations.

—Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1964). Translation by Kenneth Rexroth.

horizonlines

I have known many beautiful horizons and some have been lines of poetry.

only language to go on

The deep appeal of poetry as an art form comes from language (text/speech) being its only means.

voice shapes and pervades

‘Voice’ may be described as the way in which personality inevitably shapes and pervades language.

not explained away

Let me interpose here this axiom of criticism: by explaining the nature of a work of art, we do not explain it away. It is an entity of direct appeal; we do not, in the process of appreciation (no process but an immediate insight) unfold the process of creation.

—Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry (Sheed & Ward, 1933)

stare decisis

Some formalists are like those judges and legal scholars who are too enamored by stare decisis. Blindly in love with existing laws and tradition.

who me wow

The poem the poet writes and then can hardly recognize as his own.

magnetized fragments

Like iron filings the fragments aligned toward the magnetic pole of the theme.

gravitational force

Its atmosphere may be poetically alluring in and of itself, but content is the gravitational force of a great poem.

shaping music

As do the poets, Heraclitus follows language where it leads him, where he is receptive to its inward and autonomous authority, with somnambular yet acutely lucid trust. Hence his recurrent attempts to characterize, to make us party to the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. Day melts into night, night begetting day in subversion of the trenchant Mediterranean light. There is here no distinction between philosophic or scientific finding and poetic form. The springs of thought are identical in both (poiesis). Poetry betrays its daimon when it is too lazy or self-complacent to think deeply (Valéry’s astreindre). In turn, intellection falsifies the shaping music within itself when it forgets that it is poetry.

—George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions, 2011)

higher fi

The only fidelity to truth the poem had was to sound.

instructive reading

Trust that the poem will teach you how to read it.

find it free

Free for the taking, the delight in reading a good poem that one knows only a handful of other people know exists in print.

against art books

Unless the poems are already in circulation and its a secondary publication, I have a visceral reaction against those poetry-art books that have to be handled with gloves and cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a limited & signed edition. I have an urge to violently dogear those pages, to intentionally spill coffee on such ‘projects’.

not so fast

The poem seemed pretty straightforward, then you started to translate it.

remember and forget

Louise deserted literature as soon as she realized that Jonas was interested only in painting. She dedicated herself at once to the visual arts, visiting museums and exhibitions, dragged Jonas to them though he didn’t quite understand what his contemporaries were painting and felt bothered in his artistic simplicity. Yet he rejoiced to be so well informed about everything that concerned his art. To be sure, the next day he forgot even the name of the painter whose works he had just seen. But Louise was right when she peremptorily reminded him of one of the certainties she had kept from her literary period, namely that in reality one never forgets anything. His star decidedly protected Jonas, who could thus, without suffering in his conscience, combine the certainties of remembering and the comforts of forgetting.

—Albert Camus, “The Artist at Work,” Exile and the Kingdom (Vintage Books, 1957), translated by Justin O’Brien

no pulse

Every line he wrote was a flatline.

wonk this way

He feared he was becoming a poetry wonk.

in the novel's shadow

A poet who must overcome the notoriety of his novels. [Thinking of Thomas Hardy.]

poet present

There are people who write and publish poetry, and there are poets. It’s never hard to tell the difference when in the presence of the latter.

fluid state

A line so fluent it flirted with invisibility.

working into my own, unknown

The first seven drawings are from a group that I made in 1915-1916 when I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel and oil. The use of my materials wasn’t a problem for me. But what to say with them? I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught—not like what I had seen—shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

wrong from the gitgo

He was never going to write the right poetry.

slew of new

There seem to be an astounding number of innovative poets, all of them being ‘innovative’ all at once.

less to nothing more

A poem revised right out of existence.

linger lines

Compelled to linger among these lines.

strange engagement

Language is a part of us—but strange to us.

—Ian Hamilton Finlay, “Table Talk of Ian Hamilton Finlay,” Selections (U. of California Press, 2012)

Also see "Little Sparta".

from where

After all those years to still not know where poems come from.

stands thus

A stand-alone stanza.

they found you

Oh good, Simon Perchik and Lyn Lifshin have submitted work to your new journal. You’re really on the map now.

hero word

The hero in the poem is the word.

put to the test

Sartre, for example, wrote that I was the magus of phenomenology! I was delighted. It is true that I am sensitive to things, as Husserl says it—to things in themselves—but if I reacted that way, and a new school of young writers was needed to put this in its proper focus, in order for this to be partly understood today, if I confronted language with something neutral, something which had neither feelings nor ideas, I was doing it for man. If I placed language in front of something neutral, something which is not in itself poetic, it was simply to put it to the test. As simple as that…of course, I am sensitive to things, that’s clear, but I believe that in order to be a writer or any sort of artist, in any discipline, one has got to be sensitive to the exterior world, but also, and as much, one has got to be sensitive to the means of expression. My means of expression is language, and words the way they are; with their existence and their history, their semantical representation. And it is order to revitalize language that I place myself before something neutral, which is not yet poetical in it itself…

—Francis Ponge, in an 1972 interview, Francis Ponge: The Sun Placed in the Abyss (Sun, 1977), interview and translation by Serge Gavronsky.

early arrival

A poet commands a presence before the first word is spoken.

higher air

Poem as prayer rug. Poem as prayer flag. Poem as prayer air.

pun at his expense

He released a collected poems when a selected would do. But then, his work was always a little oeuvre the top.

too close

She began to think of him not as a critic but as a literary stalker.

expresses nothing

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing. When it shows itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

—Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

n.b.: I was in San Francisco this week and went to see a major art exhibit at the Legion of Honor: "The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900." The quote above was printed on the wall in the first room.

take a side

Ultimately, the poet must decide whether to side with the word or the world.

renga gang

The haiku poet was a known rengaleader.

audience to the rescue

After the luridly personal poems were read, the audience wasn’t sure what to do with their hands, whether they should be clapping or scooping up the mess.

fat book

[Richard Wilbur flipping through his book at the podium] I’ve written far too much. I have to hunt through fat books to find a poem. [Finding the poem] Ah, this one is good enough.

—Richard Wilbur, transcribed from a remark he made during his reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, June 2, 2012, Farmington CT.

not going anywhere

Poem: An array of words that won’t go away.