lost & found

Yes, things are lost in the notebook—then things are discovered therein as if you hadn’t written them.

mind the gap

Public consciousness of poetry is bookended by the great themes and humorous ditties, little in between do they know.

water is fine

Not one to dally, Dickinson drops in quickly to her subject: I often think of the her dashes as those wooden docks jutting out into country ponds, where on summer days she may have desired to jump into the cool water.

strength in numbers

One of those times when the open mike readers bested the featured poet.

usual speech

Poet, read aloud the way you talk.

sentence v. line

This is why the sentences rather than the lines of poems are the primary focus of our attention: the function of language is the transmission of meaning, and we’ve attended to sentences as the life-giving instrument of meaning since infancy, long before we ever started reading poems. But language is also a system in which everything is connected to everything else—tout se tient, in de Saussure’s words—which is why the orchestration of sentences through the agency of lines may produce a unique kind of musical meaning that expands the meaning of sentences as they unfold.

—Michael Ryan, ‘Winter 2004’, from Table Talk: from The Threepenny Review (Counterpoint Press, 2015), edited by Wendy Lesser, Jennifer Zahrt, and Mimi Chubb.

on display

I noticed the poet had all his published books arrayed just so on the coffee table.

reading late

As a reader, late in life, it sometimes makes me sad that I hadn’t encountered a book twenty years before or, better would have been, by the age of twenty.

poets dread

The grammarians at the gate.

no need

Using a formal device does drive poems in different and unexpected directions, sometimes yielding a real discovery, but sometimes you just a write a poem that neither you nor the world needed.

good company

He scanned the litmag’s contents page to make certain he was in good company, and then closed the litmag and filed it away for his archives.

sublime flights

There is a sheen upon his utterance like the morning dew upon a meadow before it has been sullied by human footfall. Never before Hölderlin or after him in German literature was poetry inspired to such sublime flights, far above the levels at which we ordinarily move. Everything is seen as by a soaring eagle, from the heights to which Hölderlin so ardently aspires. This is why the beings he depicts appear, as in dreams, to have shaken off the trammels of gravity, to have become bodiless spirits—for Hölderlin never learnt (this is at once his greatness and his limitation) to see the world as it is. He poetised about it; he never knew it.

—Stefan Zweig, “Hölderlin,” The Struggle with the Daemon (Pushkin Press, 2012), translated by Eden and Cedar Paul

embedded poem

Anthology concept: ‘poems’ drawn from works of fiction and prose.

warrant for the common reader

After banning many books, when they come to arrest the common reader, he will not hold up his hands, rather he will clutch the book he’s been reading to his chest in the hope it will stop a bullet.

bad prose or good poetry

A line that could be faulted in prose but would be thought of as a feature in a poem.

word house

Certain poems are the equivalent of shelter.

control of the output

One may not be able to control the reception of one’s work by the public, but one can make certain the output is sufficiently of interest that it ought to be recognized.

see anew

Poet, see anew what is known.

from an open window

The food does not always taste best in first-class restaurants. To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

—Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), Diary (Yale U. Press, 2012), translated by Lillian Vallee

turn heads

The artist should develop a turn of mind that tends to turn things on their heads.

typical hiding place

A book is where one must read through 75 pages to find one poem.

subject to collapse

A line that undermines one’s sense of reality.

epic incapable

A long, long time ago...he admitted that he was epic incapable.

some markson anecdotes

Karl Barth’s surmise:
That while the angels may play only Bach in praising God, among themselves they play Mozart. (8)

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Being Samuel Johnson’s précis of the poet’s life.
Despondency and madness, being Wordsworth’s summation of the end of same. (21)

I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Says Darwin’s Autobiography. (25)

Verses of Propertius were found copied out on walls in Pompeii. (27)

The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho, Auden called Rilke. (34)

Pope offended so many people with the Dunciad that he subsequently never left home without pistols.
Or his Great Dane. (36)

A.E. Housman, on the surest source of poetic inspiration:
A pint, at luncheon. (47)

A good-natured man of principle.
Pablo Neruda called Stalin. (56)

A walk? What on earth for?
Asked Auden at someone’s country house. (79)

It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said. (96)

The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said. (113)

In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas. And insisted he was the author of the entire poem. (119)

Wallace Stevens once worked briefly as a newspaper reporter. And was assigned to cover Stephen Crane’s funeral. (122)

Samuel Johnson, on criticism:
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still. (132)

—David Markson, This is Not a Novel (Counterpoint, 2001)

it's a small world

What is a Pushcart Prize? Is it some kind of insider self-congratulatory back-patting of the small press world?

false to experience

The more artifice the poem has, the more false it is to experience.

higher order

A command of rhetoric that rose to the level of imagery.

more than

Poet, aspire to more than a few published books and an academic post.

must be set aside

A poet must disregard poetics in the act of composition.

what is this

At first the reader didn’t recognize the text as a poem.

radio waves

There were unnoticeable rhythms in the poem, like the radio waves that pass through our bodies.

living color

In poetry, the description itself must happen.

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

workshop of the three little pigs

When the wolf came upon the first poem he could see the lines were just straw. A half-inhale was all it took to blow away the poem. The second poem he came to was made of sticks, and with a great gust of breath he blew apart the poem. But the last poem he encountered was a stanza made of brick, and no matter how hard he tried to blow and blow, the brick box held.

roadways

A line that was a dark alley. A line that was a hairpin turn. A line that was a blind curve. A line that was an on-ramp. A line that was a work zone. A line that was the last exit before the toll. A line that stretched to a vanishing point. A line that was a dead end.

no owner

The poem was published as “Anonymous” because no one would own up to it.

like jenga

A poem like Jenga in which taking away a single line could result in sudden collapse.

heavily adorned

An image encrusted poem.

pure and radiant disaster

But opposing and complementary aspects are never as distinct as one might believe. Whether they are medieval or almost contemporary, the vanquished and the suicides whom Ivan Morris depicts for us are distinguished from their Occidental counterparts by a specifically Japanese characteristic: the poetic contemplation of nature at the moment of death. Whether it is the melancholy Prince Yamato Takeru of the fourth century A.D. or Ōnishi in 1945 or the Saigō, champion of oppressed peasants in the nineteenth century, they all die with poetic refinement.

      O lone pine tree!
      O my brother!

sighs in death Prince Yamato Takeru, who had been sent to perish in yet unconquered regions on a desolate plain at the foot of a mountain by his father the emperor, who employed this classic method to get rid of a son who had become an encumbrance.

[…]

In the twentieth century, the young kamikazes, the pilots of suicide planes, also bade a poetic farewell to life before taking off with no chance of return. Thus, in 1945, a twenty-two-year-old pilot:

      If only we might fall
      Like cherry blossoms in the Spring—
      So pure and radiant!

—Margeurite Yourcenar, “The Nobility of Failure,” That Might Sculptor, Time (FSG, 1992), translation by Walter Kaiser.

[This essay deals with Japanese history and culture in books by Ivan Morris, including his work entitled The Nobility of Failure, as well as the novels of Yukio Mishima.]

epic fail

It was said to be an epic but no one could quote a single line from it.

made shift

He made shift with language, because what else can a writer do.

Ibid, ibid again

There were so many instances of ‘Ibid’ in his footnotes, I thought the author might be someone who frequented auctions.

through or over

One must read through or over the antique poetic diction.

all seen and all said

Poem of an omniscient narrator versus a poem of an overknowledgeable orator.

you walk out

Studio Ghosts

When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you. Your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics…and one by one, if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting, you walk out.
                  --From a talk with Philip Guston

—Audrey Flack, Art & Soul: Notes on Creating (ARKANA/Penguin Group, 1986)

poem as sphere

The lines seem to reconfigure into latitudes and longitudes, making a world.

in another direction

The poem was not derivative but rather dérive-ative.

trust factor

He trusted images more than metaphors.

top-heavy

A poem top-heavy with its best lines; toppling before its close.

poetry stretches

Again and again, poetry stretches words until and so that we are forced to look afresh at them, and by the same token at the concepts, experiences and attitudes behind them. The poet Randall Jarrell quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing.’

—James Camien McGuiggan, Meaning beyond definition, Aeon (online) 3 April 2023

believe in

Believe in the poem, if not in poetry.

accidental editor

The publisher mangles a line, misses a word, or drops a whole passage—still, is it better or worse?—and somehow it comes out whole.

playing against archetype

Look for the exception to the archetype.

poets and panhandlers

The dilemma of paying poets for their poems is it's like giving money to panhandlers: you want to help but you don’t want to encourage them.

too distilled

Tanka and haiku may be so distilled to their essential images that they lose all meaning, becoming refined observation without implication.

poem itself

There may be indefinite ranges of symbolic references behind the simplest Japanese poem….If one did not know the mythology he could, from participation in the poem, invent an equivalent one. This is an objective-subjective, fact-and-symbol relationship which is perhaps the defining characteristic of all great poetry. In Japanese verse it stands alone: not an aspect or factor of the poem, but the poem itself.

—Kenneth Rexroth, “Classic Japanese Poetry,” Classics Revisited (New Directions, 1965) [p. 96]

horrid words

The most horrid words are those deployed in poems only to make a rhyme.

the many and the few

Many read the long demanding poem in part, few could aver to having read all.

to build a fire

I have many poetry books. If times get tough, I can burn them for heat.

imagination and integrity

A poem in which the bravura of the imagination is matched by the integrity of the verisimilitude.

striking and prominent

When I compose a poem I generally begin with the most striking and prominent part, and if I feel pleased with my execution of that, I then proceed to fill up the other parts.

—William Wordsworth, as quoted by Alexander Dyce in his Reminiscences.

a few good ones

He wouldn’t write a minor poem. Thus, he wrote very few poems.

fire-starters

Always surprised to find ready kindling in the notebook. A few phrases, an odd sentence or two, and in no time at all a fire is built.

hardcover

His bastion study fortified with bookcases.

hear it

Poetry: Hear it, hear it first; that’s its heart.

best parts

Sometimes the best things about a book are its preface or afterword, it’s footnotes or its bibliography.

intimate junction

That is essentially what you get in H.D., very static, very imagistic, but if there’s anything that can be said to last from the world of the imagist turmoil around the time World War I, it is H.D.

Again, it’s not for all readers. To some people it may seen excessively cold and excessively distant, excessively static, excessively idealistic; and yet, it’s hard to read it without being disturbed by thoughts of what life could be and maybe has been at one instance of historical time, that maybe on one or two of these Greek islands there has been this intimate junction among flowers and wind and the seasons, a conjunction between that and the utmost creativity of their own hands and imagination, an unselfconscious sexuality and concourse and intercourse among human beings. H.D.’s is essentially an island world, almost platonist, an island world held by an utmost effort of the will in a kind of equilibrium. That essentially H.D.’s world, very small, very intense, very static, and in the best of it, very, very beautiful. I can take a lot of H.D. The only trouble is, there’s not a lot of her. If you want to pursue her further, there’s a Selected Poems issued by Grove Press, in paperback, which you can get. I love to read her when I’m about half-drunk. It’s a wonderful antidote to the easy sentimentality: all of this stuff about marble and being tempered in fiery crucibles to bring forth a perfect shape.

—James Dickey, “The Georgian Poets,” James Dickey: Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry (U. of S. Carolina Press, 2004), edited by Donald J. Greiner [183]

being sharpened

As you read the poem you could hear the poet whetting a last line.

language exceeds

A poet amazed that the poem exceeded his modest expectation. But language is like that.

overwhelmed

Like a bad general on a battlefield, the critic underestimated content’s force.

nothing to show

Unlike a person asked to solve an algebraic equation, the poet cannot answer the charge: “Show your work.”

fascinating fascist

Ezra Pound: the dicta dictator.

notebook memory

Memory no match for a notebook at hand.

[Being a digital age, any 'notes app' could suffice.]

brakes on perception

The language of poetry is difficult, laborious language, which puts the brakes on perception. In some particular cases the language of poetry approaches the language of prose, but this does not violate the law of difficulty.
[…]
Moreover, there is a strong tendency to create new language, specifically intended for poetry; as we know, Vladimir Khlebnikov is leading this school. Thus, we arrive at a definition of poetry as decelerated, contorted speech. Poetic speech is constructed speech.

—Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017), edited and translated by Alexandra Berlina [94; 95]

faithful record

Though he did create texts he resisted being called a ‘creative’ writer—he preferred thinking of himself as making a faithful record of what humankind he’d encountered and those parts of world he’d experienced.

faith-based readership

For a poet any readership one might imagine is like a belief in God, it has to be taken on faith alone.