infallible test

In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 22

fidget word

The one word that wouldn’t sit still in the poem.

first forty-eight

In the first 24, in the first 48. Like the hours after a crime, these early words are so important to solving the poem.

therefore iamb

When people asked if he was a formalist poet, he’d answer: “I amb.”

more light

So often in a writer’s photo it’s a wan person holed up in a little room, hunched over a typewriter or keyboard, with a shelf of books where a window should be.

big head

One of those titles that was smarter by half than the poem itself.

revision resistant

The problem was that the poem couldn’t be improved upon.

candy words

Nouns and verbs are sustenance. But ah, the confection of certain adjectives.

in silence and solitude

Poetry and letters
Persist in silence and solitude.

—Tu Fu, "Night in the House by the River," translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New Directions, 1956)

team player

He was happy to be a minor member of a well-known group.

stray strong

The line that strays is always the strongest one.

go small

The image was symbolic when it needed to be specific.

flavor and texture

To speak the poem would give mouthfuls of pleasure as though eating a fine meal.

back and forth

The poem as the site of reciprocity between the impulse of emotion and the shaping force of language.

are you ready yet

Some poems would engage you no matter when encountered; other poems must await that moment in your life that has opened you to them.

unambiguous

And then I had always liked the old miracle and morality plays in which no word has any ambiguity at all. I don’t like ambiguity. I suppose it’s all right if the ambiguous things a work means are interesting and exciting, but often they’re not.

—Kenneth Koch, "A Conversation with Kenneth Koch," Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Number 7, Fall 1972.

dignified literary death

His aspiration was to be the last person ever crushed by a bookcase having fallen on him.

note totems

When scholarship becomes ritualistic practice, it’s all about getting the footnotes right.

more about the dead

Critics so out of touch with the contemporary they just go on elaborating obituaries.

operative emotion

Some enjoy American musicals with their transparent songs of love, joy and loss. Others prefer operas for, even as those foreign words wash over them on the level of sense, the sounds fill them with emotion.

no way to say

There’s no word for that.

brussels lace

     My work, whatever form it may take, is seen as mischief, as lawlessness, as an accident. But that’s how I like it, so I agree. I subscribe to it with both hands.
      It is a question of how you look at it. What I prize in the doughnut is the hole. But what about the dough of the doughnut? You can gobble up the doughnut, but the hole will still be there.
      Real work is Brussels lace, the main thing in it is what holds the pattern up: air, punctures, truancy.

—Osip Mandelstam, "Fourth Prose," The Noise of Time: Selected Prose (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993), translated by Clarence Brown.

word grist

Mouth and tongue, mortar and pestle: Break down the words into syllable and phoneme.

in the service of art

Perhaps I’m less an artist, and more a servant of the art.

wild one

Poet, when they go vogue, you go rogue.

linear feet

A poet’s life measured in linear feet in the university library archive.

believable beginning

Advice to the creative writer: Start with the credible.

loose control

One of those studied tossed off poems.

that poetry

4
That poetry remains a broad permission.

5
That poetry is a controlled vocabulary for what fails to come to market.

7
That poetry is open to faithless arguments.

14
That poetry is a wilderness prior to philosophy.

21
That poetry is endlessly establishing conditions for fair use.

27
That within the poem a coming to terms may also mean a refusal to concede.

29
That the poem will not suffer its camouflage.

32
That the ‘voice of the poet’ is essentially an argument.

[A selection from a grouping indexed as 'key: SUSPENDED JUDGMENTS']

—A Maxwell, Peeping Mot (Apogee Press, 2013)

song gathers round

A song issues forth as sound waves: circles that widen outward so as to gather round, to draw close the far-flung members of the tribe.

wait it out

You could try to write more poems or you could just wait, trusting that some good ones will well up.

held time

The joy and sadness of an art like photography that arrests time.

poem made of ideas

I enjoyed reading the poetry prompt and thinking of a poem that might come from it...one I'd never write.

knowing more than one can say

As a critical writer, she feigned ignorance because sometimes that’s easier to admit than to accept one’s inability to articulate.

best unkept secret

Richard Howard, in an open address, criticized the establishment of National Poetry Month as a betrayal of “the best kept secret of all”—poetry. Every April, since the establishment of National Poetry Month, I receive a call from my local library or high school, asking if I will participate in a reading. How about November? I always ask, and the answer is always the same: People aren’t interested then; April is the month poetry goes public.

April is the cruelest month.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

—Mary Ruefle, “On Secrets,” Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)

dark wood

Why is it that each day it seems I awaken within a dark wood and yet I’ve never once embarked on composing a ‘Divine Comedy’?

reader too familiar

As he pretended to read, you noticed all the poems were recited from memory. Perhaps if he’d punctuated his reading with some remembered lines from other poets, you wouldn’t so distrust him as someone too familiar with his own writing.

winning ways

Contests, prizes and awards...the art of writing reduced to winning.

unplanned trip

The scheme of the poem, the dream of the poem.

few words we have to say

All I want is to speak simply; for this grace I pray.
For we have loaded even the song with so many kinds of music
That gradually it sinks.
And our art we so decorated that beneath the gilt
Its face is eaten away.
And it is now time for us to say the few words we have to say
Because tomorrow our soul sets sail.

—George Seferis, from “An Old Man on the River Bank,” George Seferis: Poems (Little, Brown and Company, 1964), translated by Rex Warner.

sense of an ending

Should the poem end with ‘thus…’, or with ‘and yet…’?

pound for pound the best poetics

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

The safest general characterization of the Modernist poetic tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Pound.

one-sided conversation

I got buttonholed by another talk poet today…couldn’t get a word (or even a thought) in edgewise.

more than carry over

A metaphor must be exploratory, not explanatory.

easy listening

When I slipped into the prose writer’s car, why did I know he’d be tuned to Easy 101.1.

unsure of its surroundings

Often a poetic line is composed in the form of a statement only to be put down on the page tentatively, as though a question.

accurate and modest

Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being unspectacular. Why has no one ever thought of this, one asks oneself; why not be accurate and modest.

—Marianne Moore, in a review of Bishop's North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), The Nation (Sept. 29, 1946).

mouth making

Bring a basketful of words, and some spittle for paste.

rules-based writing

A poet teaching composition is dangerous to both student and teacher.

fewer markers

To avoid punctuation he would write the long way around.

half and half

Reading his criticism, I thought to myself: Half deft, half daft.

voices and visions

Sometimes vision involves hearing things.

cover calvacade

Some many books and so few poems.

understated

The practiced reticence of her last lines.

contrarian poetics

A poet in a running argument with the world. [Thinking of Alan Dugan.]

plagiarist's curse

We must pity the plagiarists. For they’re forced to steal second-rate texts in order to escape immediate detection. And thankfully the truly great texts, the treasures of the age, some laying open for all to see, are unknown by anyone.

uncorrected sight

Never let craft eclipse vision.

shaken awake

The purpose of art is to shake us from the stupor of the ordinary. Sometimes it does that by offering an extraordinary view of the ordinary.

accident prone

One should not be afraid of accidents occurring in one’s art as accidents happen only to those who are engaged in accidents. (103)

=

Composition is a design personified, a design not mechanically perfect but emotionally perfect. A design is of an evocative nature. Design that is magic. In a perfect composition shapes excluded and shapes included are equally important. (104)

—John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1971), annotated from unpublished writings and critical introduction by Marcia Epstein Allentuck.

higher school

Poets ranked according to the prestige of the institutions where they taught.

image energy

An image is made manifest in language but its force comes from experience.

memory of perfection

I would like my work to be recognized in the classic tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the Ideal in one’s own mind. It is like a memory of perfection.

==

I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought
my mountains looked like ant hills
I saw the plains driving out of New Mexico and I thought
the plain had it
just the plane
If you draw a diagonal, that’s loose at both ends
I don’t like circles—too expanding
When I draw horizontals
you see this big plane and you have a certain feeling like
you’re expanding over the plane
Anything can be painted without representation

—Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” Writings/Schriften (Kuntzmuseum Winterthur/ Edition Cantz, 1992), edited by Herausgegeben von Dieter Schwarz

[Today Google's landing page featured a painting by Agnes Martin, to honor the 102nd anniversary of her birth.]

serious fun

A poetics of insouciance.

[Thinking of James Tate.]

singular

Make it one.

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.