title trouble

Two titles that should never appear above a poem: “Untitled” and “Poem.”

like windblown leaves

Will all your poems be uncollected?

fire in the hole

Perhaps people have trouble understanding poetry because so often a good poem is trying to explode its genre.

patience to see

Unimaginable how much patience is needed to see the simplest things. How much patience I need to write a single verse.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

from the desk of the editor #4

You've heard that Eskimos have a dozen words for snow;
we editors have at least a couple dozen for ‘No’.

important marker

A title should be more than a file tab.

first script

No neatly printed page can equal the beauty of handwritten lines in a notebook.

lit up

Each word illuminated from within by allusion.

scraped panels

In a 1995 New Yorker magazine profile of Mr. York, Calvin Tomkins said he was perhaps “the most highly admired unknown artist in America.” He described a shy man who avoided anyone connected to the art world, who worked slowly and who was perpetually dissatisfied with his work, prone to scraping down his wood panels and starting over.

Ms. Langdale said Mr. York usually wrapped his paintings in brown paper and mailed them to the gallery. She said that when one arrived, unannounced and “practically still wet,” she often felt that Mr. York “had to get it out of the house in order not to destroy it.”

—Roberta Smith, "Albert York, Reclusive Landscape Painter, Dies at 80"
The New York Times obituary, published: October 31, 2009

revisioning

Version by version the vision made manifest.

art's remuneration

One of those artists who thought the world owed him a living without proof of his worth.

window blinds

Most poems are windows, though the text sometimes blocks the view.

from the desk of the editor #3

Know that no one has read as many first few lines as you.

found objects

My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouvés of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.

—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," Wonderful Words, Silent Truth (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)

from the desk of the editor #2

Don’t say you’d like to see more of his/her work. If the writer is ready s/he doesn’t need your encouragement.

base matter

Inspiration remains hoped for, but so often art begins in the material of medium.

from the desk of the editor #1

A rejection slip that shows weakness will be responded to viciously by the rejected writer.

slighter verse

Auden with his frequent lapses into vers de société.

logic use

…where Donne uses “logic” he regularly uses it to justify illogical positions. He employs it to overthrow a conventional position or to “prove” an essentially illogical one.

—Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” The Well Wrought Urn (A Harvest Book/Harcourt, Brace, 1947).

shadow metaphor

Each rhyme pair was a shadow metaphor in the poem.

enjambment mojo

Nothing is more fetishized in free verse poetics than enjambment.

step and breath

Poetry that is not palliative, not a cure for pain and loss; rather it is a course, a way forward if only by the step of a next breath speaking a word.

poetry's lowest life-form

The poet (usually a bad one) who reads at an open mike then leaves before the last reader has had his/her say.

transitions matter

The organization and diction of a poem are completely dependent upon one another, and you should not be troubled if your first attempts to sort out the two elements are not successful. The distinction between the two is a real one, and you will soon begin to discover it yourself. You will see that organization resides not so much in the words themselves as in the transitions that separate words, clauses, sentences, and stanzas from one another. When the poet is in control of his medium, these transitions are decidedly meaningful.

—James McMichael, The Style of a Short Poem (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1967)

word borders

The margins of the page: invisible fence?

desire path

Despite structure or tradition, the poetic line is a desire path.

it's alive

For a dead thing, poetry sure is a bulging, brimming, humming, oozing, teeming, squiggling and generally astir thing.

many motives

For most people the only motive of poetry is emotion. For the poet, emotion is but one of many motives.

negative space

Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. Its knowledges are all negative and, therefore, more positive than any knowledge. Nothing that can be said about it in words is worth saying.

—A. R. Ammons, “A Poem Is a Walk,” Claims for Poetry (U. of Michigan Press, 1983), ed. Donald Hall, 8.

replete with repetition

Enough already of the anaphora.

genre disregard

Many of the poems he loved tried to shrug off the mantle of being poetry.

propped up

One of those books filled with insipid writing prompts for the uninspired.

photo portal

It was that kind of photograph you could step into and begin making a poem of what you experienced therein.

silence is the invisible kingdom

Silence in poetry is the place where words come from. The space between an event and that event becoming a poem. Silence stands at the gate, at the opening of the field. Silence gives substance to poems the way death does in life. It is the invisible parts of the poetry. It is the invisibility of what is about to appear. Like a king of the play who is invisible, held back in the wings to build up the tension. The invisible all around us in this world without our seeing it until the poem speaks. The invisible and the silence go hand and hand in poetry. Like the night train pounding through the dark town in Texas as the dogs bark. Silence is emptiness just a little afterwards. Silence is what’s invisible until the poem makes it visible. There is a huge silence built up by implication. The silence that fills up our metaphors, pretending one thing and meaning the invisible other. It is the silence of Basho's haiku. It is what's invisible in the fragments of Emily Dickinson. Silence is the invisible kingdom that the poet makes us see.

(Jack Gilbert writes this and pushes the paper across the table to Linda Gregg.)

[The above is something handwritten by Jack Gilbert late in his life. It was transcribed by me in a phone conversation with Linda Gregg, 01-30-14.]

trash poem

A merz poem: A poem constructed of words and phrases most poets would consider clearly unpoetic or just cultural trash.

no turning point

Prose poet: one whose lines run but won’t turn.

not mine

I found a poem in one of my old notebooks written by someone I hardly knew.

objects at rest

     It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic, at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.
     In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.
     Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law and beyond it.

—Pablo Neruda, “Toward an Impure Poetry,” Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 (Grove Press, 1983), translated by Ben Belitt.

extra punctuation

Poetry, as opposed to prose, has two additional means of punctuation: the line break and the space.

pressed flowers

The flowers were more preserved than the pages of verse in which they were pressed.

corporeal punishment

The last line felt like being spanked.

importantly missing

Don't be afraid to forget some of the words. Nor worry if they don't come to you.

overline

A line the rest of the poem could never live up to.

winged creatures

At night all the books I haven’t read lift from their perches in the bookcases and fly up, pages flapping wildly, fly up the stairway to my bedroom, they fly about my head at night, they try to disturb my sleep with the shame of their flapping pages. Waking in the morning, often I find one, splayed open where it has fallen upon the bedcovers.

who have loved beautiful things

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

―Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Co., 2013)

[The painting: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654)]

timing device

He would try to get at least the outline of the poem down before the tea kettle whistled.

hearing things

He gave the poem a close reading for the ear.

hard case

The poem was not obscure, it was obdurate; made of poetic material impervious to casual reading.

engaging tongue and ear

Tonight I read Yeats aloud for about an hour, and I shall do this. An hour in the morning and an hour at night. Up to the inventing of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after that, all reading was done aloud….Eliot says the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can….Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain which are used for vision. Not all the brain. This means a silent reader’s literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud—tongue and ear.

—Ted Hughes in a letter to Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar and Giroux, 1956), selected and edited by Christopher Reid.

odd old bricks

A hundred years hence will all those author photos with backdrops of bookcases seem like the writers were posing in front of ruins?

stitching it together

The alphabet is your sewing kit.

life-giving skill

The critic can only do an autopsy of the poem. In the act of revision, the poet must have the skill and confidence of a surgeon holding the living organs of a poem in his/her hands.

hurray-hurray, step right up...

Blurb writers and other carnival barkers of literature.

likeminded

The creator dreams of a kindred mind called a reader.

against the dark

Poetry

Against the dark night
a glowing screen
and a blank page.

by José Emilio Pacheco
(translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

Mexican Writers on Writing (Trinity Univ. Press, 2007), edited by Margaret Sayers Peden.

wait for it

Often a single miracle is performed at an open mike.

words equal to life

A passage achieves quotation when there’s an equation between its words and experience.

sound scape

Longhand: The sound of words being scratched out (in both senses) on paper.

sales and tales

The poet was a memoir monger.

words that we need

Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the breath when people let themselves be moved by a great force. . . When the words that we need shoot up of themselves, we have a new song.

Orpingalik, an elder of the Netsilingmiut (Netsilik Eskimo), cited in “The place where you go to listen,” by J. L. Adams, Terra Nova: Nature and Culture, 2(3), 1997, 15-16.

[Qoute encountered in Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007) by Tim Ingold.]

reaching for

Each line seemed to be an arm reaching out in the dark.

poetry reading poetry reading

Is there anything worse than hearing a poem about a poetry reading at a poetry reading?

a fin

Prose is all cartilage / poetry a fin.

—John Olson, from “Marsden Hartley’s Gloves,” Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2008)

same poem

They asked why he kept writing the same kind of poem. He said it was the kind of poem he liked.

comb through

I could feel those lines of poetry comb through my soul.

entropic poetics

It starts with those arbitrary and disassociative sequences which turn to random fragments; randomness leads to entropy, and entropy to boredom.

time stamped

Where some see avant-garde and mainstream, I just see poets scrambling and scraping, trying to write poems that will stick beyond the contemporary.

quid pro no

The poet has no responsibility to the critic. The critic tries to pay a debt by proving he/she owes nothing to the author.

luminous detail

Ezra Pound makes the distinction between “multitudinous detail*” and “luminous detail” in a poem, the latter being that image that suggests so many others because it is connected somehow to the world, the universe, the collective experience of any number of people. We can make a list of all the images we remember from eighth grade, and try to fit as many possible into a poem (the multitudinous method), or we can try for those few that glow with connections, that suggest others (the luminous method). So many lasting poems are made of recollected, luminous detail.

—David Citino, “Tell Me How It Was in the Old Days,” The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

*Ezra Pound, Selected prose, 1909-1965, William Cookson ed., New Directions, 1973, 22.

hive poem

Opening the anthology, I realized the canonical poem was almost humming, as though it was now just a hive of critical voices.

relative value

I’d rather own the best work by a minor artist than one of the lesser pieces by a great one.

erase or raise

You hear about a lot of poetry projects involving erasure from existing texts. But no one seems to use the caret…inserting additional material into a source text. Perhaps it’s easier to electively erase. Harder to hoist the banner of one’s own words within the text of another.

larger interests

As just sounds and marks I wouldn’t care a whit for words.

border war

Two writers fighting for the limelight of who is most liminal.

not embarrassed

Millay has been overlooked by the critics of our time until very recently. Two new biographies have ushered in an era in which, I trust, Millay will be brought back into the light she deserves. In all my undergraduate and graduate courses in the seventies and eighties, she was never mentioned, but The Collected Poems, a hardback, given to me by my father one Christmas when I was in college, has been on the shelf by every desk at which I have ever written a word. When I read “Renascence”—her juvenilia, really—I am not embarrassed, either for her or for me. She was learning how to write and I was learning how to read. We started thinking big. We knew, or thought we knew, that for a women’s writing to be taken seriously, we should aim for the “universal,” and what is more universal than all the human cries that ever cried? It is not a sin to overwrite. That is another thing she taught me: not to be embarrassed by large feeling, and not to be embarrassed to let your reader know of that large feeling.

—Robin Behn, “In the Music Room,” Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen.