older and shorter

Variation on Pascal: If I was older I’d have written you a shorter poem.

no echoes

Slowly from nice neat letters;
doing things well
is more important than doing them.

--

Wake up singers!
Time for the echoes to end
and the voices to begin.

--

Quarreler, boxer
fight it out with the wind.
It’s not the fundamental I
that the poet is searching for
but the essential you.

—Antonio Machado, There is No Road (White Pine Press, 2003), Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney translators.

free from mirrors

In the spare and luminous language of Machado, we find extraordinary sensitivity to place and landscape, as well as a genuine feeling for local folklore and for song as a living tradition from which to learn. His poetry is not the poetry of closed rooms but that of the open air. Many of his poem were written as the result of long walks through towns and hillsides. He often entered the inner world by first penetrating the outer world of landscapes and objects. “It is,” Machado said, “in the solitude of the countryside that a man ceases to live with mirrors.”

From the preface by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney to There is No Road (White Pine Press, 2003) by Antonio Machado.

no horizon

A poem in which you could see forever.

no limit

Writing at its best will not admit its limits in language.

dies in order to rise

In a certain sense the act of writing dies in print, then awaits resurrection by audience reaction.

dream imagination

One value of dreams is that they build confidence in the power of our imaginations.

escaped pen

Writing in bed: Too much scrabbling about the bedclothes searching for my pen.

close but not long

For a poet, all reading is close reading—which may explain why some of them have such difficulty getting through novels.

—Peter Robinson, Spirit of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms (Shearsman Books Ltd., 2009)

apology for political poetry

Someone will always be making apologies for political poetry.

drop zone

A poet doesn’t sit down to write so much as s/he must parachute over unknown territory.

spirit word

Isn’t the word ‘poem’ a spirit in the world?

let me tell you

Gamblers will let slip news of their recent winnings while being stoic and tight-lipped as regards to their long losing streaks, and it’s the same with writers and their acceptances against the larger accumulation of rejection slips.

posed poiesis

In Stevens’ poems all the important questions about poetry are posed.

etch in light

There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

—Diane di Prima, from "Rant"

naming rights

With his writing and publishing not going well, he hatched a scheme to begin copyrighting the works of Anonymous as his own.

no need to reach

When you observe common things closely they have an emphatic quality, a thusness that is like a charge around them and which is both beautiful and satisfying. To see the way the corners of the room meet or the light bounces off a floorboard is enough of a reason for life. Painters understand that the interesting object is the round glass, the box, the rusty down-pipe and that there is no need to reach for a meaning beyond what is visible. By their beauty, objects bring the eye of beholder into contact with infinity.

—John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros (Shambhala Publications, 2008)

hey let's hangout and do art

For most artists isn’t collaboration a way to kill time between doing one’s own work.

things seen or heard

He didn’t write poems so much as he faithfully recorded what he saw and heard.

better in time

Among the dangerous notions is ‘the progress of the arts’.

word order

In Gertrude Stein’s writing the words are rather plain and generic while the rhetoric is particular when it’s not peculiar.

things therein

A poem that was a cabinet of curiosities

formerly acquainted with

He had a falling out with his ideal reader.

known rivers

I looked out the window of the Pullman at the great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South, and I began to think what that river, the old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the past—how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave in times of bondage. Then I remembered reading how Abraham Lincoln had made a trip down the Mississippi on a raft to New Orleans, and how he had seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should be removed from American life. Then I began to think about other rivers in our past—the Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa—and the thought came to me: “I’ve known rivers,” and I put it down on the back of an envelope I had in my pocket, and within the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered speed in the dusk, I had written the poem, which I called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, in The Langston Hughes Reader (G. Braziller, 1958).

local fame

He was famous in a group of about ten poets.

line lance

Poet, give spur to your charger and lower your line like a lance.

dancer, follow my lead

The poem should always be asking the reader to step up.

spill into silence

Epigraph for a commonplace book: Pity those with prodigious memories, for they have no need to record the gems found when reading, and when their lives are over their mind troves will spill into silence.

against foie gras

One’s notebook should not be force-fed.

coldest thing I ever felt

Sometimes I hear him typing, and often I hear a woodpecker and think it is he. He loves to canoe, and has been in the water, swimming slowly around for a time with a smile on his face, and remarking very gently after a bit, “Why Fairfield. It’s the coldest thing I ever felt.

—Fairfield Porter, “To Frank O’Hara, Aug 1 1955,” quoted in John T. Spike, Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (New York, Harry Abrams, 1992), 120.

[I encountered this quote in Douglas Crase’s AMERIFIL.TXT: A Commonplace Book (The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996)]

until it turns

A poetic line begins but doesn’t have a known end, until it turns.

notes and chords

If language is our instrument, the words and phrases are our notes and chords.

[This cannot be a new thought.]

much greater thing

Almost every artist overestimates the impact and the influence of his/her art.

brain drain

After the Enlightenment the exegetes fled from the Bible to literature; hence we have scholarly critics.

image of note

    The mussel flats ooze out,
    And now the barnacles, embossed,
    Stacked rocks are pedestals for strangers,
    For my own strange sons,
    Scraping in the pools,
    Imperiling their pure reflections.

Anne Stevenson, from "With My Sons at Boarhills."

first rule of criticism

A critic must not corrupt the text with invented material.

body before book

He was still young enough to prefer taking someone’s body to bed rather than a book.

quote from the blue

With quoted entries ranging from the obscure to the random, it was an ‘uncommonplace book’.

aide-sommeil

Bad blurb: This book is the perfect bedside companion.

undisturbed philistine

[Printed on the complimentary bookmark from Blackwell’s, 50, 51 Broad Street, Oxford]
The famous Bookshop where generations of undergraduates and graduates, poets and philistines alike, have browsed to their hearts’ content undisturbed.
—The Sunday Times [no date given]

n.b.: I first read ‘philosophers’ for ‘philistines’ in the quote above. Attracting ‘poets and philosophers alike’ would be a better bit of advertising for the bookshop. What good is a browsed book that cannot disturb a philistine?

critic types

A thug critic, a theory critic, a thiswayandorthat critic.

cut through

It was no caesura, it was a scissor’s cut through the line.

play no favorites

No word held higher than another.

preferred experience

It was a poem I’d rather have read to me, than have had to read myself.

classically defined

‘Classical qualities, classical form’ are easy words to say. What exactly do they mean? They imply an idea of excellence; they imply also clearness, sobriety, the art of composition; they mean, finally, that reason, rather than imagination and sensibility, presides over the execution of the work, and that the writer dominates his material.

—Jules Lemaître, “Guy De Maupassant,” Literary Impressions (Kennikat Press, 1971)

laid out in there

Old anthology with a charnel house for a contents page.

no rain

Block: Why will the letters not rain over the desert blankness of the page?

pressed poetry

Oppression makes poets. In the land of perfect liberty songs are not pressed out of the heart.

—Elia Peattie (8/14/96: 8)

[Emerson: Poems are expedients to get bread. (paraphrase)]

preferred if not perfect

As a critic he knew not to expect perfect, but he knew what to prefer.

against whiplash

Perhaps a prose poet gets tired of being jerked around by linebreaks.

wag and shrug

The poet shrugs as the grammarian wags a finger.

poetry speaking

Certain words when you come upon them in a poem signal this is poetic writing.

like a burr

An aphorism
should be
like a burr:
sting,
stick,
and leave
a little soreness
afterwards.

—Irving Layton, "Aphs," The Whole Bloody Bird: Obs, Aphs & Pomes (1969)

out of order

One who put art ahead of life, and then was dead.

turn at the cliff's edge

A good line of poetry creates an uneasy expectation if not a cliffhanger.

well said newly seen

An aphorism shouldn’t be (as Pope put it) ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express'd’; for however ‘well expressed’, it will not move us unless the words convey a novel way of seeing an important aspect of the world or our existence.

nonce upon a time

Poems that are half-told tales, interrupted narratives, improbable parables, or stories that lose their way.

was flying

Bruno, I've spent my life looking for that door to finally open in my music. Just anything, a crack...I remember in New York, one night...A red dress. Yes, red, and it looked great on her. So, one night we were with Miles and Hal...we'd been going over the same stuff for an hour I think, just us, so happy...Miles played something so beautiful it almost knocks me off my chair, and then I was off, I closed my eyes, and I was flying, Bruno, I swear to you I was flying...I could hear myself as if it was from very far away but inside myself...

—Julio Cortázar, “The Pursuer” The Jazz Fiction Anthology (Indiana U. Press, 2009), edited by Sascha Feinstein and David Rife, translation by Sandra Kingery.

in bits and pieces

An anecdotal poetics: The way he talked about poetry via remarks and vignettes.

[Thinking of Jack Gilbert]

known unknown

The poet always knows more about the poem than you do.

postcard poets

Browsing an old postcard site using the search word ‘poet’ I found that Russia had by far the greatest number of poet postcards. A little window into how certain cultures value poetry.

be quoted or die

Literary fame is measured by being oft-quoted.

more renown

One of those poets who thought by publishing so much, renown would follow.

avoided drawing

A poet who alluded when it was time to illustrate.

ruling passion

Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any tasks or formed any relationship that seem inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric. Prose has been my livelihood, but I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different nature of poetry, and the themes that I chose are always linked in my mind with outstanding poetic problems.

—Robert Graves, The White Goddess (Faber & Faber, 1948)

meter was his métier

He could scan a line of poetry with his eyes closed.

part way

He was a writer who didn’t finish things.

lookalikes

One of those old white poets who grew a Whitmanic beard in the last years of his life.

[Thinking of John Berryman, Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, etc.]

after the storm

That line fell across the page like a downed tree,
and it took out some powerlines with it.

against which

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), translated by P. Winch, p 16.

poem that lives

A poem lives by its memorable lines and the reader’s feel for the worth of its whole.

ur-genre

If a good poet is using prose it's being used toward some purpose or for some effect. Poetry is the ur-genre: It takes and uses whatever resources the language offers. And when the language is lacking resources, poetry may well create a few more elements no one knew were there.

of leaves and fascicles

Nineteenth century America produced just two preeminent poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).

Walt self-published his books and was a great self-promoter, to the point of publishing reviews in newspapers of his own books. Walt had the goods and knew he had them: Walt’s poetry was expansive and innovative, pressing particularly on the boundary of poetry and prose, and putting equal pressure on the mores of his times. His poetry (Leaves of Grass) was published in several editions. He sunk his teeth into the times, and at the time of his death, the literary world had grudgingly caught up to Walt. His Leaves inexhaustible.

Emily was not known in her lifetime. Note that her dates fit within Whitman’s. Though she wrote many poems, she published only a handful of them. Her style was eccentric and her thinking was bold. If her poems were published in the state they were written, most readers of her day would be appalled or nonplused by them. Emily took pains to preserve her poems; tied up in tidy fascicles stored in a bureau drawer. Then she asked her sister Lavinia to destroy them upon her death. That didn’t happen and Emily's poems, surviving well-meaning but intrusive editing, eventually were recognized.

In time we’ll know who were the most important poets of twentieth century America. There are contenders but will it be as few as two?

and many others

How does it feel to be “And Many Others”?: Anthologies that list (on the back cover or in ads) only some of the contributors.

unappreciated crap

Poetry, The New Yorker, APR, The Paris Review, et al, they’re all publishing crap. But not my crap.