afraid it will end

One of those poems you could feel getting longer. A good long poem gets shorter; in fact, you’re afraid it will end.

sacred text

A personal anthology of favorite poems is like a sacred text.

line strikes

Sometimes a line of poetry strikes inside, hard, deep—down into that well we might as well call the soul.

relative fame

In the end no one is more famous than Anonymous.

cascading images

When the images come cascading down the page, some may lose their luster.

first door

When a poet has had a long career, like Philip Levine’s, it seems to matter what book/door you first entered. For me, when it comes to Levine, it’s The Names of the Lost.

ceremonial character

English poetry too has had its ceremonial words, different at different epochs; but the tendency in English poetry has been, at recurrent intervals, to make a furious attack upon them: to rout them out and throw them on the scrap-heap, so that poetry should heighten and irradiate the ordinary language of men. Nevertheless, the ceremonial character of poetry remains, and must remain. Even when it uses the commonest words, it does not speak commonly….One cannot read poetry as one glances over a paragraph in the newspaper; it does not, as it were, sit down to the tea-table with us. Though it comes home to us, like nothing else, though it tells of human joy and grief

     in widest commonalty spread,

it nevertheless requires a certain preparation of the mind, however unassuming. It is in the world, but not of the world.

—Aubrey de Selincourt, On Reading Poetry (Phoenix House Ltd, 1952), 15-16

[The line “in widest commonalty spread,” is by Wordsworth. Aubrey de Selincourt quotes G. F. Bradley as saying: “Poetry is in the world, but not of the world.” I cannot identify G. F. Bradley at this time.]

predictable results

The use of unusual and novel poetic forms will produce obscure and ignorable poems.

bagatelle

A poem as clever as it was slight.

evidently confident

Judging from the number of workshops being offered, many writers evidently are confident that they can teach good writing.

engine for perception

Be on guard! Don’t let your language go slack and without purpose. Let it be an engine for perception, a testing ground for truth, and a finite lens to the infinite.

—Bert Meyers during a workshop, quoted by Maurya Simon in “Fire Undressed My Bones: Remembering Poet Bert Meyers,” Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master, edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams (Unsung Masters Series, 2023)

closed nets

Poets are ignored or neglected for various reasons, and seldom is any kind active antipathy involved, rather, it’s just laziness on the part of critics and of readers unwilling to open wide their nets beyond what they already know.

winking at you

One of those linebreaks that’s winking at you…knows it’s oh so clever.

image of note: crows

Crows pass above like arguments with wings.

—David Pontrelli, from “Outpost,” Poems for Streets and People: 1991-2001 (Cold Mountain Press, 2023)

[Images/similes/metaphors that fuse the concrete and the abstract.]

oed till the end

I happen to own a full-sized set of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was given to me by my wife as a wedding present. Just wow. I don’t go to them as often in this digital age, but I will keep them to the end of my life. If I open my arms I could try to lift them, but the volumes end to end are near a yard wide, and each volume is a foot high, each volume a tome. Word tomb now? It would be like trying to lift sacred stone tablets. I’d be afraid they’d slip from my grip, break apart on the ground, words, words, words, spilling out.

trainwreck artist

Did the poet really think that making his life a disaster would make him a great artist, or knowing that he was making a disaster of his life, did he justify his actions as being for the sake of his art?

[Thinking of John Berryman]

messed up lives

Investigating the lives of our literary gods we find they were as messed up as the Greek gods.

say when

Excess even in a short poem.

form finds a function

Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free verse poem reinvents the poem.
[…]
When you’re working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.

“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.

—Ursula Le Guin, “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts,” afterword to Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014 (PM Pres, 2015)

true surreal

The true surreal that is not meant to shock but to astonish.

articulate learning

In close reading or critical analysis of the poem what is learned comes from the articulation of one’s response to the piece.

generative entity

Ashbery as both Proteus and Proust.

reading is the event

Young poet, reading poetry is more important than poetry readings.

suspect speaker

Resist the default notion that the speaker of the poem is the self-same person as the name in the byline.

charge to poets

It’s the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless.

—Grace Paley, “Of Poetry and Women and the World,” Just a Thought (FSG, 1998)

first or last

The first line of the poem should have been the last.

heretofore unseen

Whether by wonder or dismay, in that moment of first experiencing the art, no one would be able to recognize the artist’s accomplishment until much later.

not that close

His close reading of poems was ‘close’, in that it was inexact.

things carried along

Model for a poem: The wind along the street catches up leaves, bits of paper and other debris.

fuse public and private

Frank O’Hara’s great popularity surely has something to do with his ability to fuse public and private, to capture those moments of everyday life when we respond, overtly or just subliminally, to the “breaking news” of the day.

—Marjorie Perloff, on “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!),” The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (U. of Penn Press, 2022)

epigram for one book

The time I took
to make this book,
being both debut
and long review.

hard work

Art should be difficult to take up and equally hard to set aside.

whole not parts

A lyric retains its wholeness while a long poem is known by parts.

stands and stands

There will be poet challengers to certain canonical poets, but some of challenged poets will never be tilted or knocked off their pedestals.

no brand

I hope never to hear of a poet developing his/her brand.

fee for fee

Literary presses trading permission fees.

not blank

Even when a poet begins a poem, her page is not totally blank but houses ghosts of what poetry is, has been, and could be.

—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

starting block

Poets often concern themselves with the end words of their lines. The first word in the line should be seen as the runner in the starting block, poised to take that first thrusting step.

lost lines

The poem was forgetting itself line by line.

marketing plan

The poet’s distribution strategy was to drive around town putting his new book inside all the tiny library stanchions he could find.

alternate route

Poets and artists must resist this: The MFA way or the highway.

A degree works for some but not for others. A watershed has many tributaries.

no five-seven-five

There’s no counting in haiku. (Of syllables that is.)

edge of the void

…often poetic forms, even non-rhyming ones, are about end words. I don’t like to think of end words as the point of the line—the break is not more central to the line than the rest of the unit—but there is, yes, something significant about those ultimate words. They need a little more courage, hanging out right at the edge of the void.

—Elisa Gabbert, “Cross-talk,” The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 15, 2023

straight up

Fearless in his critique of famous poets because some had asked him for his opinion, and he gave it straight.

know a poem

In phrases, images, rhythms, style,...you can know a poem without having memorized a single line.

required study

To really know poetry requires an education akin to training in the sciences.

poetic engagement

There are many people who write poetry who are not poets. A ‘poet’ is someone whose engagement with the world is absolute and integral. There are writers of poetry who use language as a substitute for artist engagement.

diorama poem

The poem as diorama: a miniature curated space that you can peer into and into which you can pretend for a while to dwell.

three recognitions

As I’ve said, the actual subject of any poem is the reader. The poem should be where the reader sees himself afresh, momentarily freed from the trappings of the world. But for this to occur, the reader must be able to find his way into the poem as a participant. Metaphor, through its question-asking process, is a partial way to do this. But it is also necessary for the reader to apprehend and authenticate the event or situation of the poem with his memory. That is, he must take part in the poem by engaging in an act of recognition.

This recognition can be divided into three general types: intellectual, physical and emotional. When I say 5x5=25, you engage in an act of intellectual recognition. When I describe the smell of apples, the recognition is physical. When I talk of the difficulty of love, the recognition is emotional.

It is rarely so simple. Any recognition will often be made up of all three parts, although only one part may predominate.

—Stephen Dobyns, “Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy [p 210]

higher order

The audience for poetry is more advanced than the audiences of other arts, because more is required of those who follow poetry.

not fade away

Dante has held up well over time. That's what literature is: Writing something that doesn’t fade from consciousness of the cognoscenti.

postmo tv

It’s not coincidence that Post Modernism and television came of age concurrently.

an old value

Prudence is prophylactic to the prolific.

[Thinking of the new Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's Septology. Please stop the egomaniacal madness.]

many things at once

A poet can hold many things at one time inside the head.

bootleg and spatchcock

And here is the main difficulty that imagism and its derivatives and variations run into every time. Most ideas are not contained in the mere names of things, nor even in the description of things, and have to be supplied from elsewhere. If you are and say you are in principle against any ideas save such as come packaged in things and the names of things, you will have to bootleg your ideas in somehow-anyhow and spatchcock them onto your poem somehow-anyway, while continuing to proclaim you are doing no such thing.

—Howard Nemerov, “Image and Metaphor,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

weave for whatever it is

Find a language pattern that matters to the poem’s content.

no through-cut

For him the thesis never came easily.

through the side door

Frost entered the Modern canon through the farmhouse’s side door, with the nineteenth century’s snow still on his boots, bringing in a load of firewood for the stove.

rosebud image

Looking for his ‘Rosebud’ image: the thing that would flash upon one’s mind in the moment before death.

images floating by

Images as flotsam of the oceanic mind.

useless objects

When Arp writes of a “bladeless knife from which a handle is missing,” when Norge speaks of a “time when the onion used to make people laugh,” we have images, configurations, which employ archetypal elements but are not properly speaking archetypes. Instead, we have the emergence of entities which only by the force of utterance and the upheaval they cause in the imagination and thought acquire existence and even reality. These “useless objects” have a strange authority. Even as visionary acts, they consist of particulars and thus curiously provide us with a semblance of actual experience.

—Charles Simic, “Negative Capability and its Children,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

gull line

You can ask for no better line than a gull cutting across the horizon near dusk.

was a tank

The poem was a tank...it was self-contained and could not be stopped.

waste no word

 Poet, waste no word or thus lessen the thrust of the line.

marble face

Each letter set like in piton in the marble face of the page.

function, structure and design.

The Roman architect Vitruvius suggested that buildings can be judged according to their utilitas, firmitas, and venustas, that is, according to their fitness for their purpose, their structural soundness, and their beauty; or, in Richard Krautheimer’s version, their function, structure, and design.

—Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art, (HarperCollins, 1989)

[The same criteria could be applied to a good poem.]

stance against subject

By style one finds the stance necessary to confront the subject.

that poem that

That poem that does that. You’ll know it when you hear/read it.

load-bearing line

A line must bear the weight of the one or many above it.

go for a walk

Paul Klee’s suggestion to ‘go for a walk with a line’, applies to poetry as well.

rhyme made me do it

Another insipid turn of phrase brought forth by making a rhyme.

music of thought

The music of a poem can come from its thoughts.

claw marks

Every poem shall be a tearing up of a poem,
not a poem, but claw marks.

—Edith Södergran (1892-1923), ending of the poem “Decision,” translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström, The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden (Milkweed Editions and The Poetry Foundation, 2013).

life index

A poem that was the index to your existence.

experience everlasting

The first time you read the poem you knew you’d encountered an inexhaustible resource.