only abyss below

Often a poem must end with the bottom dropping out—and the reader must try to enjoy the free-fall without screaming too much.

about poems

It’s about the poems not where they were published.

not on the same page

Two poets were talking about the value of reading, how it informed their work, and probably they were reading entirely different books.

tell me what you know

I want your poem to tell me how much you know about poetry.

intensely dismal poem

    In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning her husband [Thomas] is at his desk:
    Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

—David Markson, Vanishing Point (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004)

substitution of terms

When you see a good move, look for a better one.
—Emanuel Lasker

When you write a good line, look for a better one.

under the hood

Emotion being the poem’s motor.

revision's end

It was while revising the poem you realized it wasn’t worth the effort.

vehicle language

In a poem, language is the vehicle and not the road, nor its destination.

safe for now

It’s a good thing you put that copyright mark next to your name beneath the poem, otherwise poets would be lined up to plagiarize your masterpiece.

wasn't it

Vivaldi Years

I lay forever, didn’t I, behind those old windows,
listening to Bach and resurrecting my life.
I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes
while the violins shrieked and the cellos trembled.
It was a crazy youth, wasn’t it, letting
my mind soar like that, giving myself
up to poetry the way I did.
It was a little like Goethe’s, wasn’t it,
a little like Eugene O’Neill’s, one joyous
sadness after another. That was the everlasting
life, wasn’t it. The true world without end.

—Gerald Stern, Paradise Poems (1984)

prose all along

Whether or not cast in meter and/or rhyme, if the lines are readable, then they’re prose.

hardly a trail

A poem may reveal almost nothing of its path: a broken twig, a stone disturbed, with little else to follow.

not safe

The poetry workshop should not be a safe space. They’re talking about your poem, not you.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

—William Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

not undertanding

One can misunderstand a poem in a thousand ways. That’s okay, that’s what it means to try to read poetry.

no time

The best poems are atemporal.

intent vs. use

An author may write with intent but it’s good to remember what matters to the reader is use.

small check

Even during the times when he was making hundreds of thousands per year, it pleased him to get $200 for doing a reading or $50 for a published poem.

thousand yard stare

You can recognize a writer by the way s/he stares off into space.

rid of convention

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history. Well, I don't know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did.

—Richard Serra (1998)

barrel of the bat

The last line was like Babe Ruth’s ‘called shot’: He all but said it was coming and then with one swing of a line, he delivered.

course and not conclusion

Lead you readers forward but let them draw their own conclusions.

find a translation

One of the biggest mistakes I made early in my reading life was to pass over the foreign words and phrases I encountered. My loss. Now I pause and get at least a rough or partial translation. Of course now the web makes things easier. In any case, my reading has been deepened by taking the time to find a translation.

word from nowhere

The improbable word that makes possible the whole poem.

poetic asides

There are poems one wants to publish that aren’t the poems one wants to be known for.

for want of a pen

Sometimes I think I became a writer solely because I love holding a nice pen.

substitution of terms

Anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
—Niels Bohr

Anyone who thinks they can talk about poetry without feeling dizzy hasn’t yet understood the first thing about it.

writing studio

     The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.
     In a building that no longer exists—but can still be seen in El Greco’s View of Toledo.

—David Markson, The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)

write the room

A prose poet knows how to ‘write’ the room.

sleight of letters

The word is the alphabet’s prestidigitation.

bohemians at the gate

Bohemination: When the neighborhood becomes filled with artists and poets, and the panhandlers are driven out for lack of prospects with money in their pockets.

uncontainable

There is no form equal to this content, it must be allowed to spill without container or spout.

train whistle

A line of poetry that was a train whistle far off in the night.

crossing boundaries

Those visual aspects of Ramón’s prose are of paramount importance: temporal qualities are subordinated to the spatial predilections of the author. That is why very little “happens” in his fiction. It bears pointing out in passing, that painting crosses national as well as artistic boundaries much more easily than does literature.

Aphorisms: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, selected and translated from the texts entitled greguerias, with a critical introduction by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1989)

ready for it

Poet, don’t just pull another epiphany out of the hat.

fussy too much

There is such a thing as fussy revision that matters not when it comes to the reader's experience.

light verse ahead

Playing to pop culture can only lead to light verse.

hounded by form

Poet, form will keep coming for you.

without emotion or argument

Writing wherein nothing is at stake either emotionally or in terms of argument.

not equal

Remember that no poem is equal to a life.

three-legged stool

I’ve always felt that Rilke stands with one foot in the nineteenth century and other planted in the twenty-first. I’ve sometimes thought of him, especially in The Elegies as the poetic leg of a three-legged stool—the other two being Einstein and Freud/Jung.

—Art Beck, Etudes: A Rilke Recital, Translations and Commentary (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021)

[Quote encountered in a review of the above book in Wally Swist’s A Writer’s Statement of Beauty (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2022)]

figures dancing

Reading a poem and thinking that the printed letters are figures dancing.

supplied beyond demand

The modest demand for poetry books faces an amplest supply.

sum of a story

The sum of any story is the impact of its content plus the quality of the imparting narration.

lines configured as a web

The poet tries to make consecutive horizontal lines configure themselves as a web in the mind.

seedy exactitude

Philip Larkin in his capacity as librarian at Hull University came into Bertram Rota [London bookseller], looking for copies of his own early books for the university collections. This struck me as a self-flagellatory exercise….If sometimes I label him “The Bard of Impotence” this is not to say he was not a good poet, a paragon of seedy exactitude, but that his oeuvre exudes impotence, whether it be his own, this country’s, or both together. Despair becomes its own comfort zone, which may explain his immense appeal to the happily depressed masses. When I offered him a copy of his first book, The North Ship (1945), for £200 he balked at the price, saying, ‘What, for that piece of rubbish!’ The librarian left with his satchel empty. The poet, on the other hand, would have thought the book less rubbishy had it been a tenth the price?

—Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade: a memoir (Biblioasis, 2022) (87)

line denies line

A poem in which the first line denied the title and each line after repudiated the prior.

peep show

Publishing one’s poem is a way to be seen, but it’s a tiny peephole with nary an eye passing by.

cadence cascade

Not regular meter but the cadence of a stream passing over stones.

by the line

The editors of the haiku magazine decided to pay their contributors—by the line.

eat it or read it

From the book review of SUPER-INFINITE: The Transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell:

Rundell’s own style can dazzle, though at times the wit feels a bit strained, as when she describes Donne’s unreadable tract “Pseudo-Martyr” as “so dense it would be swifter to eat it than to read it."

-
I can think of a poem or two that one might say was "so dense it would be swifter to eat it than to read it."

take only what you need

He never applied for artist fellowships or grants. His day job provided money enough, so why compete with those who needed the extra income.

multum in parvo

A poem of modest length but majestic in scope.

not sticky

He’s published a dozen books and not one poem sticks in the public consciousness.

failures in poetry

I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.

—Linda Gregg, from “The Letter,” Sacraments of Desire (Graywolf Press, 1991)

[n.b.: Linda Gregg born on September 9.]

lenticular card

The first draft often contains another poem embedded therein, or even more than one poem partly hidden within. It’s like one of those lenticular flicker cards you used to get from a Cracker Jack box. You look at the card and you see an image, but turn the card only slightly, and a whole new image will appear.

song to poem

Poet, listen to beautiful songs and the poems will follow.

numbers game

Often the author’s bio will tout how many books published as if that counted when it comes to art.

either direction

He wrote the poem frontwards and then backwards, and it worked either way.

gift horse pass by

Give the awards to those who need them. Others will find rewards in the work itself.

call it style

He thought that if he was bad at some aspects of writing, those errors might manifest themselves as a kind of style.

struck by a chisel or ax

All edifices of art need to be built upon thought’s solid foundation.

If it’s not a poem, no matter what form it’s in, it’s not a poem.

Deep eclectic thought, rendered through easily apprehended language, creates poetry of the highest order.

I live: I sing.

It’s natural that poets thirst for some kind of a constitution: In addition to ensuring the people’s daily bread as well as their well-being, a country must safeguard its art from destruction.

If, while writing, your work feels forced, when it is read by others, it will feel even more forced.

What are the secrets for writing poetry?
—With naïve and honest eyes, look at the world, and convey what you comprehend and what you feel through the simplest forms of language.

The beauty inherent in poetry is the luminance of humanity’s upward-striving spirit expressed entirely through the poet’s passion. This kind of luminance not only glitters and splashes like embers from a fire in darkness, but also shoots out like sparks from a rock struck by a chisel or ax.

—Ai Qing, “Excerpts from the Notebooks,” Selected Poems (Crown, 2021), translated by Robert Dorsett

[n.b.: Ai Qing was the father of the artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Qing was a poet and dissident imprisoned for resisting the totalitarian regime in China.]

margin width

All poets are marginalized, but some have wider margins to write/work in.

it goes like this

He recited the poem from bad memory and somehow managed to improve upon the composition.

two-way street

One can only hold the critic to account when he quotes from the text on which he expounds.

in the foothills

In the foothills of Parnassus you’ll see fires burning at night. Places where poets had stopped to camp, left with nothing to burn but their books.

three realms

The finest writing is for the voice. There are several good, not to say decisive, reasons for this. No word is a word by itself. Every word is multiple, and not simply because there are homonyms and homophones hanging around, pretending to be friends. A word is made of sounds. A word is made of marks. A word is made of little muscle movements in the throat which accompany our interior speech—that invisible, inaudible, yet clearly heard interior talk of which Samuel Beckett made himself the master. So there are two spoken tongues to set against the one we write. And if we allow the written word to stand for the spoken one, and the silent speech to precede both, then the written word works in three realms at once, not just one.

—William H. Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

commercially viable poet

Strange pairing: A poet with an agent.

bad fit

In art, it takes courage to be incongruous.

stand in

These days it may be worth it to hire a model for your author photo.

right wrong word

The word you worry about using may be the one that makes the poem work. Turns out it is the right wrong word.

loose sheets

I haven’t got a manuscript. I have only a pile of poems.

prose buttress

A foot/headnote to a poem is but a prose buttress. Ideally free-standing the poem should be.

take off our wings

To Grazyna, from Starachowice
You see poetry as pure sublimity, eternity, sighs and moans—in quantities unrivaled even by fin de siècle nameday parties for young ladies. Such flourishes go nowhere with contemporary readers, say, even your nearest and dearest will, upon hearing a single sentence, glance panic-stricken at their interlocutor and suddenly recall urgent errands in town. So, shall we take off our wings and try writing on foot?

—Wislawa Szymborska, How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) (New Directions, 2021), translated by Clare Cavanagh

[n.b.: From a collection of pieces that Szymborska wrote in her regular column called Literary Mailbox in the Polish journal Literary Life.]