going there

A poet doesn’t know what’s ineffable.

poems distilled

15
Memory is the purest form of imagination.
(Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”)

45

Anyone can be a gun, but it takes a poet to go off half-cocked.
(Dickinson, 768)

169

Finding a poem in a blank page is like finding a snowman in flakes still falling from the sky.
(Stevens, “The Snow Man”)

321

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.
(Ginsberg, “Howl”)

454

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

(L. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again")

464

Sometimes we have to die many times to figure out how we want to live.
(Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)

—George Murray, Quick (ECW Press, 2017)

no contest

Don’t tell me about your petty prizes. I want to read your incontestable poem.

too much

The poem was perfumed music.

essence of

Squeeze a parable and get a proverb.

deep meaning

A poem that was smart all the way down to the level of etymology.

poet's lot

His therapist assured him that being an unknown poet was not something to be ashamed of.

contemporaneity

George Steiner often insists that the concept of “contemporaneity” should be taken into serious consideration. For instance, it is crucial to know that Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire lived at the exact same time in order to understand the deep relevance of one’s work to the other’s. Manet’s fascination with eroticism and modernity coexisted with a more classical touch, which was rooted in a long tradition of painting. In that sense, when his oeuvre was presented in 2011 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, naming him the “man who invented modernity,” such a claim could only be accurate if related to the perpetuation of certain traditions. Modernity exists alongside tradition. And Baudelaire stands in a similar position. The literary critic Antoine Compagnon famously described his poems as “antimodern,” meaning that they were written as much in contradiction to as in close relation to modernity. Therefore, Baudelaire’s poems and Manet’s paintings, which may seem to be produced in parallel realities, indeed have a lot in common.

—Donatien Grau, The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

gnarled lines

With its many digressions, the poem tied itself up in knots.

step back

The poet talks the prose line back from the edge.

well-wrought ask

A question must be composed better than a statement.

not a transcendent act

I was going to suggest that 'This poem needs to molt its form.' Then I realized that act is not a metamorphosis.

cross purposes

When the narrative intersects with the random.

requisite equine

I put horses in poems, but I’ve never ridden one. They just seem like a good thing to put into literature.

—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Graywolf Press, 2017)

shared dream

I thought she said the poem was “dream of consciousness.”

word hose

That line was a firehose of words…

second to none

Even among anthology pieces the poem stood out.

my stalker

I once perhaps lingered too long on Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA in Creative Writing website. Since then whoever, or what bot, manages their web advertising has had an ad follow me around the web. It seems wherever I surf there is this ad featuring a comely and sincere looking creative writing teacher holding her hand up, with a slightly bent forefinger, as though she were instructing me. After a month or so, being followed around the web by her, my intended instructor, I think of her as a stalker.

affluent

Each line a tributary.

everything and nothing

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

—Walt Whitman, "Shut Not Your Doors," Leaves of Grass (1865)

backdoor left unlocked

Often the best poems one writes are those poems one backs into.

rejection note

It’s nice to see the evolution of your poetry, proving so well that you don’t believe in intelligent design.

thin as it may seem

Language is the organizing scrim that makes the world intelligible.

poem at large

Leaving a page of poetry at the bus stop or on a park bench is not littering.

deep dark line

Her lines mattered like those of an etcher.

no mouth

Readers:
Roses have no mouth,
So they address your nose with their scent.
The moon has no mouth,
So it speaks to your eyes with its light.
Then with what should a poet speak?

—Oguma Hideo, from “Talk Up a Storm,” Long, Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1901-1940 (Center for Japanese Studies, The U. of Michigan, 1989)

unread and not ready

Too much speaking about poetry without due study.

solid, liquid or gas

As a solid the poem is a form, it can be held and viewed easily from all sides. In a liquid state the poem moves, flows, divides and recombines, never easy to contain. As a gas the poem is not easy to see, it rises and dissipates quickly, leaving no trace. The ideal state of a poem is liquid.

one-way street

Some failed philosophers become poets, but failed poets seldom become philosophers.

reading report

I heard the poet A.E. Stallings read today. It was the 54th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program reading. Her work was weaker than all the past readers I’ve heard (going back over a decade). She has a strong background in the Classics (Greek & Latin) but it seems wasted when it comes to her poetry. Stallings read a ‘limerick sequence’ (if you could believe someone would think writing one was a good idea) based on various mythic figures and tales…wow, that was a painful experience to hear. I did like one poem based on the Minotaur myth, wherein the Minotaur isn't slayed by Theseus, but dies trapped below earth after an earthquake has collapsed the structures above his labyrinth.

Stallings is also a translator from the Greek and Latin. I liked something she said about that. Paraphrasing her here: ‘I prefer to translate dead poets. They don’t have any opinions about or objections to your translation.’

waiting for light

Paintings stacked in a basement; poems in an unopened book.

word stock

One of the many beneficent aspects of poetry: Learning new words.

hung in space and silence

     My own notion of a poetry reading is quite different. I want the poet to talk about his poems as little as possible, and not so much about the poems as about something one step removed. The voice in which he does his talking unfortunately is the same voice the poor poems must borrow. The more we hear him the less we may be able to hear them.
     I should like poems hung, one at a time, like Japanese pictures, on the exquisite air, each poem surrounded by space and silence.

—Robert Francis, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry (U. of Massachusetts Press, 1968).

scenes from my life

Was that a book of poems or a verbal scrapbook of family vignettes?

known by heart

Without glancing at the contents page or index he cracked open the book at the very poem he wanted to read again.

not god (sic) enough

Even if a god offered to ghost write the poem the poet would demur.

in the public square

A symbol monger. An image grinder. A diction trader. A rhetoric freak. A sound dog.

written over

Critic, create an exegesis that exceeds the text.

reality calling

In ordinary language words call up the reality, but when language is truly poetic, the reality calls up the words.

—Joseph Joubert, Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899), translated by Katharine Lyttelton.

not beyond me

Poetry doesn’t need those disappointed poets who have stopped reading and writing poetry only because their work was never recognized.

on the down low

Let’s keep poetry our secret. Otherwise the culture will only ruin it for us.

sargeant major

With a glance at the page, the words started to fall into line and form ranks.

hard reading

A poet of a taxing syntax.

bhizzt phizzt

A typo is a language short circuit. It breaks and effectively ends the transmission as the reader’s mind struggles to create the proper connection.

keep an animal

[The poet’s] tragedy is summed up in these word written in a private letter by a contemporary American poet: “For more than a month I have not been able to find time to write anything, and you know how heavy that is to a writer who feels all of youth lost to keep an animal.” Here is the animal, crying to be feed and warmed and housed. Here is the poet, who cannot rest from wanting to set down the bit of reality that he has been able to seize.

—Babette Deutsch, “The Plight of Poetry,” The American Mercury (May 1926)

small window

He talked in those commonplaces of the workshop method, thus you could tell that everything he knew about poetry was learned in the couple of years he’d spent in a MFA program.

not the breaking point

For all its effects, the only thing important about the linebreak is that it shouldn’t be where the reader stops reading.

see-saw

The inverse ratio of heft of content to height of rhetoric.

high notes

He only wanted to sing the arias.

covenant of pathos

Stuck for a day in Chicago, I wandered over to The Art Institute of Chicago. (Not that anyone had to twist my arm. We're talking about visiting one of the great museums of the world.) In the Modern wing I happened upon an unattractive though clearly expressionistic portrait by Ludwig Meidner. The label stated this:

Though perhaps best known for his visionary, apocalyptic landscapes, Ludwig Meidner, like many German Expressionists, used portraiture to explore the inner emotional life of his subjects. "Do not be afraid of the face of a human being," Meidner once said. "Don’t let your pen stop until the soul of that one opposite you is wedded to yours in a covenant of pathos." In addition to making self-portraits, Meidner painted many of Berlin’s literati, including the Expressionist poet and theater critic Max Herrmann-Neisse. The artist used the thick paint, energetic brushwork, and distorted form characteristic of Expressionist painting to communicate his subject’s inner vitality and psychological life.

odd angle

Critic, see it slant.

no line drawn

The prose poet willingly risks even the genre for the good of the poem.

arrival point

To think of the poem’s end as being an arrival.

flightless bird

So many feathers and sequins, the piece sagged under the weight of its costume.

dead end or avenue

People think that many poems are hard to read because of the vocabulary, proper names, lacunae, allusions, etc., things they don’t readily recognize. That’s not a difficulty, that’s an opportunity to explore new avenues of understanding.

nothing too lavish

In a review of Middle Span by George Santayana, in The New Statesman, June 26, 1948, Raymond Mortimer joined [Santayana] with Picasso as the two living Spaniards most conspicuous for genius and said…
"they have both chosen to be expatriates yet retain under their cosmopolitanism a deep Spanishness—the sense “that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime or too festive, yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a contortion, a comedy of illusions.”

Quoted in Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book, a facsimile and transcription, edited and introduced by Milton J. Bates.

there and not there

Poetry is literature’s dark matter.

take it to the streets

The street poet was threatened by the local authorities with vagrancy and public nuisance. It was then he knew he’d made it as a poet.

earned bona fides

Critics certify themselves review by review.

certain touchstones

Never through my own but only by reading certain poems by others do I realize why I’ve given over so much of my life to poetry.

undimmed by familiarity

Thought proceeds by scheme and sequence; it manipulates, puts things where it wants them, makes different designs from any that the eyes see, and, what is more, know that it is doing so. Conscious art selects from nature and by selecting adds. In the process the forms of nature inevitably take second place; their edges are blunted to fit the ruling design, and the complex final effect, being composed of many parts, diminishes the being of any one part. Yet the price of this triumph is violation of our senses. We evidently see at any moment a sequence of sharp particulars—the light at a window, a tree trunk, the gray of a rock—single, peremptory impressions, moving in endless specificity across our vision. A part of our life belongs to them; we know the world and feel at home in it not least through these sure reminders. Happiness, one sometimes thinks, is clarity of vision, moments when things stand clear in sharpest outline, undimmed by familiarity as if revealed for the first time. Such moments bring back, so to speak, the memory of Eden sparkling on the first day of creation, the tree of life soaring in the middle, and if Eden be related to our childhood, they bring back childhood too. In this spirit Gladstone entitled his book on Homer Juventus Mundi, the world’s youth…

—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Heroic Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)

working dog

A critic should be a terrier let loose in a thicket of letters.

figures in space

The poem’s rhetorical figures reminded one of watching a troupe of acrobats going through their convoluted routines.

limits of understanding

A great poem cannot be taught, it can only be explored together intelligently.

foreplay

The title titillated but that was it.

impressed hard

I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.

—George Tooker (1920-2011), American artist.

overdressed

A minor poet draped in the mantle of his long poem.

currency trade

If poetry is a kind of money it’s as mysterious in value as bitcoin.

lost articles

The poems only his notebook has known.

lean into the corner

All one expects of the word at the end of a line is that it holds the corner.

walk as prophecies

As {Wm.] James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets. They too urged that men should walk as prophecies of the next age rather than in the fear of God or in the light of Reason. Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” deliberately and explicitly enlarged the meaning of the term “poetry.” That word, he said, “may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination.’” In this wider sense, he said, poetry is “connate with the origin of man.” It was, he went on to say, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.” It is “something divine…at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and the blossom of all other systems of thought.” Just as the Enlightenment had deified Reason, so Shelley and other romantics deified what I have been calling “The Imagination.”

—Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (U. of Virginia Press, 2017)

bounty not border

Poetry’s allegiance is to the resources of language and not to the boundaries of genre.

aspiring attendant

Each stanza should be a poem-in-waiting.

mishandled analog device

The young man picked up the book, then fumbled around looking for its power button.

stop, look and listen

Poet, be a fearless witness.