amateur maker

Bless and pity the amateurs in art and in poetry. So moved they are by art, they want to try to make it.

poet of a certain age

If you call poetry ‘verse’ you immediately mark yourself as retrograde.

no discrimination

What a Paradise for poets the Great World would be, if any discrimination were made between fine gold and brass.

—Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections and Aphorisms (Ticknor & Fields, 1961), forward by Gore Vidal. [p 170]

shut in

What a terrible lot to realize one has been taxonomized, thereby shunted and dismissed, into a particular literary movement or mode.

fully less

A luxuriant style, ascetic only in terms of content.

category angst

Definitions and their discontents.

run over

That pang of disappointment felt when you turn a page expecting another poem, only to realize that the one you were reading hasn’t ended.

beauty can't be stopped

The setting for Linda Gregg’s poem “Fragments” is an underground subway car, late at night in the city. The speaker observes the pathos and unglamorous fatigue of the other riders. We’ve been here before, we readers, in life as well as in literature. Yet the abstract assertion in line five, when we encounter it, gathers the entire scene into a unified magnetic field:

   You can’t call the exhausted people on
   the 1 or 9 beautiful. Especially
   the drunk at the back yelling and stumbling
   and grabbing the pole gracefully just
   in time. Beauty has a strangeness.

[…]

Indeed, the poem's worldly descriptions are now changed, because they are filtered through the idea of beauty. We see that “Fragments” is making the case for a particular kind of beauty: the beauty of so-called ordinary reality, even in its most awkward, tawdry manifestations. Even in fatigue, asserts the poem, even in this flawed impoverished setting, beauty makes its appearances. Beauty cannot be stopped.

—Tony Hoagland, “Say It. Say it.” The Art of Voice (Norton, 2019)

deep seething

An important but unfinished poem, like a long dormant volcano, might erupt at any time.

true or trending

There is a real audience and a manufactured audience. The latter will not stay with the author even over her/his lifetime.

one hundred

If you can’t name one hundred poets, then you can’t say you have even partial knowledge of contemporary poetry.

serious about books

I’m not saying he was overzealous about keeping his library intact, but his bookplate featured a human skull overwritten with the words:
‘Under Penalty of Death
Return this Book to X’.

patterns and pairs

A poetry that was a matter of pattern and pairings.

above the sway of things

[Narrator: the painter Masuji Ono, grown old.]
‘Being at Takeda’s,” I told them, ‘taught me an important lesson early in my life. That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority. The Takeda experience taught me never to follow the crowd blindly, but to consider carefully the direction in which I was being pushed. And if there’s one thing I’ve tried to encourage you all to do, it’s been to rise above the sway of things. To rise above the undesirable and decadent influences that have swamped us and have done so much to weaken the fibre of our nation these past ten, fifteen years.’ No doubt I was a little drunk and sounded rather grandiose, but that was the way those sessions around that corner table went.

‘Indeed, Sensei,’ someone said, ‘we must all remember that. We must all endeavor to rise above the sway of things.’

—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, 1989)

title bigger than the book

The more grand and encompassing its title, the less likely it is that the anthology adequately contains the important writing of its time.

another unexpected poem

Poets say they don’t know where poems come from, right before writing another one.

meaning what

A poem of semantic antics.

shooting script

Poem as script to be enacted by the reader.

putting poets aside

And so a gathering like this of ours, when it includes such men as most of us claim to be, requires no extraneous voices, not even of the poets, whom one cannot question on the sense of what they say; when they are adduced in discussion we are generally told by some that the poet thought so and so, and by others, something different, and they go on arguing about a matter which they are powerless to determine. No, this sort of meeting is avoided by men of culture, who prefer to converse directly with each other, and to use their own way of speech in putting one another by turns to the test. It is this sort of person that I think you and I ought rather to imitate; putting the poets aside, let us hold our discussion together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and of ourselves.

—Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras (Leob classical edition, W.R.M. Lamb translation)

and it is me

I found the perfect reader for my poem, and it was me: Only I could see all the nuances, subtleties, allusions packed into the poem.

stage over page

In almost all cases hearing a poet read in person will sway me more toward his/her work.

lightly read

It was the kind of publication that had no readers except for those contributors who bothered to read their own work upon publication, checking the piece for typos.

make and mark

The artist creates, and the audience defines.

sweet disorder in the dress

Poetry will forever be too motley for dress of definition.

song elevates

At its best song elevates equally the music and the words.

no rush

He was never accused of rushing to publish.

recognizes no borders

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Quoted July 2, 1967)

ready reader

A reader of poetry must develop some tolerance for incoherence.

ars longa

Always there are writers who won’t survive their discovery phase.

crux of the matter

There must be a crux: A place in the poem where some act or scene is shown to have consequence or significance we could characterize as poetic.

brought from the world

The best poetry is found not in language but in the world; so that the poem by means of language becomes what was brought back, with consonant effect, from the world.

not ever pure

Guillén was aware that, whatever else, purely poetic poetry would be quite boring. And something more serious: it was linguistically impossible since language is by nature impure. A “pure poetry” would be one in which language had ceased to be language.

—Octavio Paz, “Jorge Guillén,” On Poets and Others (Arcade Publishing, 1986), translation by Michael Schmidt.

one way

One door: Wonder.

end and beginning

As I closed the book I sensed that a face turned from me to drift toward another reader.

line breeder

The lines seemed to breed one after another as though endless in their lineage.

words lifted on high

To be quoted is the apotheosis of anything said or written.

blake beginning to end blake

Blake began and ended in Blake.

—Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman Speaks (Library of America, 2019), edited by Brenda Wineapple

[Late in Walt Whitman’s life he had the good fortune to meet Horace Traubel. Traubel became devoted to Whitman and over a period of some years faithfully recorded Walt Whitman’s musings on a wide variety of subjects. Eventually 9 volumes of Whitman as recorded by Traubel were published, the last two volumes not published until 1966. Brenda Wineapple has distilled and organized this vast body of material into a single volume, grouping Whitman’s thoughts under headings like Reading, Leaves of Grass, Sex, History, Lincoln, My Philosophy, etc. The above remark by Whitman comes from the section “Writers.”]

mucked hand

What poker players can teach poets is that many more hands should be folded rather than played.

played close to the verse

Know that this poem will die with its secrets.

that poem again

The poem the poet was remembered by versus the poem the poet wished to be remembered by.

[Of the former, I'm thinking of Randall Jarrell and "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner".]

awaken the words

Miss Stein is bringing back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined groups of words, their sleepy family habits; then she rebrightens them, examines their texture, and builds them into new and vital shapes.

—Edith Sitwell, Poetry and Criticism (Hogarth Essays No.11, Hogarth Press, 1925)

life stuff

Caution: Don’t try I-do-this-I-do-that poetry unless your life is like Frank O’Hara’s.

seen from a window

Sometimes finding the words is a matter of turning away from the page and looking out the window. Sometimes it requires leaving the building and going for a walk.

well-spring

Each word was a well of associations.

for the ages

He said he wrote for the ages and it was true he did do a lot of readings in elder-care facilities.

world wins

It’s a given that the poem as written will never match the world as experienced.

found dance

For many days no movement came to me. And then one day came the thought: These columns which seem so straight and still are not really straight, each one curving gently from the base to the height, and each one is in flowing movement, never resting, and the movement of each is in harmony with the others. And as I thought this my arms rose slowly toward the Temple and I leaned forward—and then I knew I had found my dance, and it was a Prayer.
“The Parthenon”
==
I have noticed that when I introduce any innovation into my art, the music critics insult me in the same terms which they employ ten years later to honor my imitators.
"Fragments and Thoughts"

—Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance (Theatre Arts Books, 1969)

[This is a lovely book, nicely illustrated with drawings and photos. And I enjoyed reading Duncan’s thoughts on dance and art more generally. I was particularly interested in her emphasis on dance as natural expression (versus ballet being against nature and harming the body). However, there are a few racist notions in this book, I’m afraid.]

figure off-center

Poet, stand apart…and take your place in the world.

relative value

This one stanza was equal to a thousand other poems.

realistic demand curve

The good thing about print-on-demand is that the poet can’t imagine an audience that doesn’t exist.

prevailing wind

A poet who was a weathervane of the zeitgeist.

proper order

To write a perfect poem you would first have to invent its perfect reader.

poetry camp

Grandmother, when can I go to poetry camp?

What in the hell is poetry camp?

Where a bunch of teenage girls go into the woods to write poetry.

I know what teenage girls do in the woods and it’s not poetry.

—Marilyn Chin, from “Poetry Camp,” A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2018)

prolonged second

An instant lasting centuries: To write a haiku with a long half-life.

poem made known

If it gets lodged in your throat, if you choke-up speaking it aloud, it’s a poem.

eyes open

Poet, even during sleep, don’t close your eyes.

after and late

A poet so prone to the elegiac one wondered had he ever lived.

sieve for a poem

Zazen and poetry are both studies of the mind. I find the internal pressure exerted by emotion and by a koan to be similar in surprising and unpredictable ways. Zen is a wonderful sieve through which to pour a poem. It strains out whatever's inessential.

—Chase Twichell, interview Tricycle magazine, Fall 2003.

it was

Poetry of a very high order.

speaking role

A poet who won’t be shouted down.

acute hearing

A poet hears what the universe whispers.

promise of more

It had the vague outlines of a sublime poem.

poetic setting

It didn’t matter how good the poetry was, because I was listening to poetry sitting in the shade of a tree tousled by the breeze.

chance encounter

Poetic determinism: Is that a red flag?

[graffiti encountered today in a hallway at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe]

images over ideas

In writing to [L.W.] Payne about “Domination of Black,” [Wallace Stevens] said, “I am sorry that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas at all, because its sole purpose is to fill the mind with images… A mind that examines such a poem for its prose content gets absolutely nothing from it.”

Wallace Stevens, quoted from Letters of Wallace Stevens, in a A Thought to be Rehearsed: Aphorism in Wallace Stevens’s Poetry (UMI Research Press, 1983) by Beverly Coyle, p. 45.

spiritual practice

When he was asked his religion, he answered that he practiced Poetry.

beyond all that

Very little of what is in a grammar book or a style guide makes any difference to a poet.

time mired

One of those formalists mired in time.

thing itself

When writing a ‘thing poem’ the prop is the prompt.

known unknown

Save me from the celebrity poet: Give me the ignored poet, uneasy with attention, that’s who I want to read.

knew only the new

A great critic smitten with what’s au courant while lacking a sense for what is universal in poetry.

puzzles me most

Though scarcely a confessional poet I write about my life. Impossible not to, really, since it’s what puzzles me most. The lyric voice permits me to acknowledge that, when I write about frames, I may also be writing about my life and, conversely, though I write about what looks like my life I might as well write about any object that is both discrete and amenable, cordial and solitary. Much as any person is. Much as a frame tends to be.

Of the letters of the alphabet, only one works as a perfect frame. It is the O of the gold frame of Michelangelo’s ‘Doni Tondo’, of the mouth of Beckett’s Not I, the o of omphalos and origin, of globe and moon, of look and book, of for and good. Of open and store. Of close and lose. Of hole and whole. Of do and don’t. Of hold and go. Of no and not. Of alone and know and so and old and, yes, love.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

x'ed libris

Dear Librarian, whenever you must unburden your shelves of some books, let me offer that I prefer to find the word WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, rather than the harsher DISCARDED.

fast start

He wrote all his best poems before he was twenty.

first 4-8

By the first 4 to 8 lines the reader will be either all-in or will be looking for that exit line that lets him/her out.