invisible influence

The first time the actors rehearsed the scene in the bedroom, the bureaus were empty props. The director had them fill the drawers with their own underwear, bras, socks, jeans, t-shirts and such. In the next rehearsal, though none of the clothes were visible, the two actors lived the scene.

feeding the web's maw

There is no poem so lacking in intellectual nourishment that the internet will not eat it.

might be both

No easy answer: Was that a poem or a dream you just told me?

careful where you step

The droppings of poets were all about. Someone must have been feeding them prompts again.

would move the world

The line that was an Archimedean lever.

dark star moments

To feel the center of a poem, one has to have felt the significance of all of the poem’s moments, moments of lesser as well as greater intensity that nevertheless are crucial to the poem’s structure and cumulative power. […]

The center can occur anywhere in the poem. It can be a phrase or a stanza, or it may reveal its energy in the gap between stanzas. It can be a moment where the poem’s tension is most palpably enacted, where the poem’s time frames or layers interact simultaneously, where the texture of the poem undergoes significant variation, where the poem contradicts itself, or where the poem seem to quicken and gather itself in a passage that acts as a kind of net. The center is where the reader feels most powerfully the sensations of the poem’s theme. And nearly always, the center contains a pivot or surprise that gives the whole poem simultaneously light and darkness, hence considerable range.

I call these moments “dark star” moments, after an image in a beautifully crafted poem by James Tate titled Consumed. This poem manages, through apparently conventional rhetorical gestures of question and answer, elaboration on that answer and then conclusion, to catapult the reader into a state of uncertainty that is bracing, absolute, and utterly resistant to paraphrase:

Consumed by James Tate

—Leslie Ullman, “A ‘Dark Star’ Passes Through It,” Library of Small Happiness (Three: A Taos Press, 2017)

filled in the blanks

Poets write the white space too.

one and many

In order to say something insightful about any one poem, you need to have read enough others.

shared reading

Not to explain the poem, not to know the poem exactly, yet still trying to find a shared reading of the poem, however imperfect or partial.

old marquee

Like on the marquee of a closed-down theater, letters had tilted, slipped down or fallen entirely from the title.

to reveal the real

Using the imagination not for sake of pure fancy, but to better apprehend reality, to look inside or to glimpse the seldom seen sides of things.

turn back

Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies—those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness. ‘Un-,’ ‘not,’ ‘non,’ ‘no,’ ‘never,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘nowhere’ and other isotopes of the same linguistic element are present in his last lines, time and time again. ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, could have been the poster child for this lecture, but there are dozens more such endings, and this from a relatively modest output…

—Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures (Faber, 2021)

get lost

The reverie that one must get lost in before anything is revealed.

stone room

A stanza that is a room made of stone.

image test

Is it an image or an idle detail?

maybe said too much

You can’t walk back that line.

noise of the soul

He sits in a cramped attic,
The candle stub stings the eye
While the pencil in his hand
Converses with him in private.

He writes a song of sad thoughts,
Catches the shadow of the past within his heart,
And this noise…this noise of the soul…
He will sell tomorrow for a ruble.

—Sergei Yesenin, The Last Poet of the Village: poems by Sergei Yesenin (Sensitive Skin Books, 2019), translated by Anton Yakovlev

first where

Avant-gardists arguing over who got there first, never questioning if there was any there there (or was it like Stein’s Oakland).

double bind

He had to discipline his mind to resist restraint in his art.

not a couplet

The cathedral towers of Chartres don’t rime.

preemptive strike

Draft cover note:

Dear Editor,
I both suspect your capacity and reject your right to pass judgement on the merits of my poetry, thus you must accept the accompanying poems forthwith.

bottomless feeling

In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of association) increases the excitement of the poetry.
[…]
We often feel elation when reading Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake because the poet is following some arc of association that corresponds to the inner life of objects he or she speaks of, for example, the association between lids of eyes and the bark of stones [de Nerval’s poem "Golden Lines"]. The associative paths are not private to the poet, but are somehow inherent in the universe.
[…]
The poet who is “leaping” makes a jump from an object soaked in conscious psychic substance to an object soaked in latent or instinctive psychic substance. One real joy of poetry—not the only one—is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

—Robert Bly, “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (Harper & Row, 1990)

i is i

To use the term ‘speaker’ when talking about the ‘I’ in a poem offers a useful distancing from the poet—but even in a persona poem or dramatic monologue the personal ‘I’ pervades the poem.

deep ink

All I can say is his best poems were his tattoos.

like orpheus

Poet, go down singing.

is it live or memorex

Even the present tense is recorded and merely played back as though live.

something to show for it

Workshop was cancelled, so he may not have had the benefit of consultation but he had the consolation of a poem written.

used to the stars

But poets have never grown used to the stars; and it is their business to prevent anybody else ever growing used to them.

—G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1932)

interior design

The saddest books are those used as décor by interior designers.

language zones

Like climate zones the poem’s language may be lush or spare, or either in different places.

still hungry

A manifesto is a menu with nothing to eat.

sit satisfied

There are times when after much searching and consideration we must be satisfied just to sit with the poem's mysteries.

desire to try

However complex and difficult the poem may be, it should engender in the reader a desire to unravel its mysteries.

quaker meeting

A poem should be composed like a Quaker meeting: With much sitting in silence until provoked from an unknown source to speak.

It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place.

—Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order (1956), trans. by Rollo H. Myers, 153.

good looking books

A small press publisher who had a reputation for producing beautiful books by inferior writers.

protector of the art

He was one of poetry’s paladins.

called forth

It matters not if the poem starts as prayer or grocery list, only a few words are called for, and the poem called forth.

anything you say

One can love another’s words without believing a word of them.

to hear great things

I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J.

—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (Viking Press, 1975)

memory of robert bly

I heard Robert Bly read no more than a couple times in my life. Memorable for me was when we brought our infant son to a reading Bly did in Springfield MA. Generally we could get away with doing that, by sitting in the back in case we had to make a hasty exit. This time it didn't work so well: The baby let out a loud cry...but before we could get up and hurry out of the room, Bly called for us to bring the baby to him. Stopping his reading to greet the baby with good words and praise for his early interest in poetry, etc. I'm not certain all of the audience was pleased by the interruption, but you'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to be impressed by his generous spirit...and it made a lasting impression on my wife and me.

genre renegade

Often the best poets are those writers who hardly know what poetry is.

poetry smitten

One of those poets who was too much in love with poetry.

faults and falls

The greater the writer the more transgressions we tend to forgive. A minor writer will not survive even one stumble of bad behavior.

my life in realtime

The journal is the narcissist’s preferred genre.

gift text

A short gift inscription handwritten inside the front of the book exceeded the literary merit of all the print that followed.

clean lines

To me writing haiku is a good exercise. I dig and respect them because they create an image—paint a picture—so precisely. They draw pictures in very clean lines. You say what you want to say symbolically. I work with haiku a lot in my attempt to handle the language—the word. I don’t see haiku as black form, but, then, you utilize whatever modes or vehicles are available to you.

—Etheridge Knight, interview by Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo 19:4 (Fall 1996).

hand-me-downs

Writers who teach writing by repackaging advice received from their teachers.

[After reading another craft book chockful common advice essays. Plus prompts!]

waiting a turn

A poet waits for recognition from other poets awaiting recognition from other poets…

starting gate

The first line should be like the start of a horse race. Each word, whether calm or jumpy, guided into a stall of the starting gate. Then…the bell rings, and they run.

backward or forward

Both memory and imagination must rely on experience.

nothing worse

Couplet: Is there anything worse / than a novel in verse?

boundary-dissolving moment

…to fully experience a boundary-dissolving moment in a poem, we must first dissolve the boundary that separates us from the poem itself. When we analyze and interpret a poem, when we put all our energies into “figuring it out,” we separate ourselves from it. The poem becomes an object of study, a problem to be solved. Analyzing/interpreting poems has its place and its value, but reading this way keeps us at a distance. In a mindful or spiritual reading, what we want is to enter the poem, to live in the field of its imaginative energy for a time, to appreciate and experience it rather than think about it.

—John Brehm, The Dharma of Poetry (Wisdom Publications, 2021)

where it's going

The poet may know, but the reader shouldn’t know where the poem is going or where it will come out.

by words alone

Poet, let language be your primary allegiance.

don't pull

Let them hear your heart-strings snap back.

inexact fit

A poet knows how hard it is to enfold in language even a very small part of the world.

unremunerated

“Penny for your thoughts,” I said to the pensive poet. “Sad,” he replied, “but that’s more than I made last year from my published work.”

not too pure

Cleanse your spirit of spleen, my teacher said, before exercising your function as critics. Not that the voiding of spleen doesn’t pose certain dangers: there are some souls who have nothing else to offer, who run the risk of blanking themselves out with purgation. “Be pure, be pure, and evermore be pure: but be not too pure,” for we live in essential impurity. Melancholia, black bile—asta bilis—has joined with the poet more than once to produce imperishable pages. There is no need to begrudge the critic a little melancholy. Nonetheless, a little soap here, a little swab there have their place in the household of literature.

Antonio Machado, Juan De Mairena* (Univ. of California Press, 1963), edited and translated by Ben Belitt

*‘Juan De Mairena’ was a pseudonym of Machado's. The Marirena persona being a provincial professor of rhetoric, philosophy and literature. The subtitle of this book: Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda, and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor with an Appendix of Poems from The Apocryphal Songbooks.

on hold

Block: Even Dial-a-Poem put me on hold.

fragment or figment

Forever certain there is a magnificent fragment in my notebook, if only I could find it.

wayside words

Wayside words: Not all words are worth perpetuating.

phenom poet

They had made her so famous so fast that no one would ever take her seriously. She was now phenomenon, not a person.

insufficient condition

A prose poem in which the prose never rose to a condition of poetry.

three polish aphorisms

I had so much joy in my creations that there cannot be a question of merit.
—Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935)

Tell me what books you have at home; I’ll tell you who you are.
—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980)

Beyond each corner a number of new directions lie in wait.
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

[Beyond each line-break a number of new directions lie in wait.]

A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms (Polish Heritage Publications, 1997) compiled and translated by Jacek Galazka

no event necessary

Some poems answer an occasion but most arise ex nihilo.

imaginative writing

When he didn’t get the creative writing teaching gig, the poet asked why: His c.v. lacked imagination, was the response he got.

green screen

His writing was merely green screen upon which his images would be layered in.

hear me

The poets tripped over themselves trying to get to the microphone. I’m afraid it was no grail.

pot alive

Thinking back to the pottery class I once went to in which the amateur potters, if they produced a few decent pots, at least went some way toward revealing their secret selves. A coarse-spoken graceless woman would produce something delicate; myself, something like a cow pat. (The vase that turned in stages of collapse into a low-sided dish, then a plate, then did service as an ashtray.) At least from pottery I learned that a pot is either alive or dead…In a pot that deserves to live, the fire still licks around the clay and, even if it is centuries old, the potter still touches his work.

—Elizabeth Smither, The Commonplace Book (Auckland U. Press, 2011), p. 118

arras surface

There was a poem written all over the real poem.

knot straight

All the lines written straight across the page, yet the poem was a knot of language.

said too much

A mind that rivered ceaselessly to the mouth.

size that doesn't matter

Monumentality impresses too easily. Take a few steps back to consider whether the impact is real or initial intimidation due to scale.

wallpaper

So much of the poetry published online becomes just the unnoticed wallpaper of the web.