bored through

I was bored by your poem…no, what I mean to say, is that your poem bored through me.

speaking from beyond

Poets are eager to become mouthpieces for the dead.

lyric audacity

‘Where did this fat, good-natured officer…get such astounding lyric audacity, the mark of a great poet?’ wrote Leo Tolstoy of Afanasy Fet.

[…]

[Afanasy Fet’s] poetic credo he summed up in a few words: ‘Anyone who cannot throw himself head-first from the seventh storey with the unshakable belief that he will be borne up on the air is no poet.’ The fixing of a moment in eternity (‘I look straight from time into eternity’)—the fixing in perpetual stillness of an accidental, transient, elusive moment of the soul, of some everyday detail—is the characteristic texture of his poetry:

     This leaf that has withered and fallen
     Burns with eternal gold in song.

[…]

Lyric audacity is the key to the musicality in Fet’s poetry. Not the communication of meaning, but the inculcation of a mood. Feeling abolishes logic. Fet wrote: ‘Poetry and music are not just related, they are inseparable. All enduring works of poetry, from the Old Testament to Goethe to Pushkin, are essentially musical—songs, harmony--, also truth. I have always been drawn away from the explicit sphere of words to the indeterminate sphere of music, and have gone as far as my strength allowed.’ Tchaikovsky wrote of Fet: ‘I think his poetry is marvellous…At his best, Fet oversteps the bounds of poetry and strides boldly into our terrain. Fet often reminds me of Beethoven.’

[…]

Each poem has its own melody, its rhythmic profile, which is repeated in no other. ‘Seeking to re-create the harmony of truth, the poetic spirit automatically hits on the appropriate musical structure…No musical mood, no work of art’, wrote Fet.

—“The Poetry of Afanasy Fet” by Yevgeny Vinokurov, an essay, which formed the introduction to a Russian edition of Afanasy Fet’s selected poems (1976), translated by Maxwell Shorter.

Afanasy Fet: I have come to you to greet you, selected poems translated by James Greene. Introduction by Harold Gifford and an essay by Yevgeny Vinokurov (Angel Press, 1982).

marvels enough

A kind of poetry that I resisted on many levels yet there were marvels enough in the language to engage me, to keep me reading.

lyric spark

The poem may be directed to an other or a beloved, yet the self remains the lyric spark.

anaphora and other refrains

Do I repeat myself, yes, I contain multiples. [tweaking Whitman]

poet me

A poet with all the self-satisfaction you’d expect of an egotist on display.

gambit without the game

The small poem is a flash, a gesture, a gambit without the game that follows. There’s no room for landscape here, or easeful reflection, but there is the opportunity for humor and poignancy. And this minimalist practice has its masters.

—Billy Collins, Afterword to Musical Tables (Random House, 2022)

the way in

Through poetic imagery we experience immanence.

chastened reader

Lately what I’ve been reading shames me enough not to write. And that’s a good thing.

unexpected inevitable

The last line should at first be unexpected but then be inevitable.

bodily function

I don’t write until I feel a physical necessity to commit a feeling or a notion to text. Writing as a bodily function.

amid alien circumstances

The substance of the late poetry is, then, the emotion of the Poet as Poet (in the romantic sense) when faced with modern times, when forced to exist and to practice his art in the circumstances of the last forty years. . . . Yeats shifted from the effort to write the “poetic” poetry of the nineties to the concern, as poet, with what it was to be a poet amid the alien circumstances of his age. That is why he is so often, in his later poetry, writing about the artists, scholars, and beautiful women he has known, and their unfortunate lives. . . . The will to seek one’s opposite, the doctrine that one must seek one’s anti-self, is at once the method by means of which Yeats found his genuine and peculiar theme, and one more example of the concern with acting a part which flows from the obsession with Art. The result has been a group of poems which will be known as long as the English language exists.

—Delmore Schwartz, “The Poet as Poet” (1939), Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, (U. of Chicago Press, 1970), edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker

seriously seated

Like avid gamers, writers try to avoid being AFK (away from the keyboard).

by comparison

AI generated poetry makes flarf poetry look like poetic genius.

few stitches

To be permitted a few stitches in literature’s great tapestry.

a book set aside

He'd set aside the book about a decade ago and just today picked it up again as though nothing had happened in between.

programmed plagiarist

Isn’t writing a poem via an AI assist just a special case of plagiarism?

personal music

I learned, from Edwin [Denby], that each phrase was an object and that word order was plastic; that each word used all of its space and so had to fill it; that each line floated as well as connected; and that where a sentence stopped and another began was ambiguous, like in speech. I learned that one could place personal suffering in a context that might be communal as of persons or communal as of objects and actions and words—either one worked as community. I thus learned a scale one was being along that began with oneself and others in one’s apartment and proceeded out onto the street and into the imaginary space of painting and ballet on up into the sky above tall buildings, all inside one and one inside it. I learned not to fear the sound of personal peculiarities in poetry, personal “music,” that that’s what the poems would finally be made of.

—Alice Notley, “Intersections with Edwin’s Lines,” Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 (The Song Cave, 2023)

reading together

The beauty of reading literary criticism is that you get to read together with another engaged and thoughtful person, and no matter that the arguments are necessarily unresolved.

brief dip

A book he could tell early on he would not read in full.

two types

A memory hoarder v. an experience giver.

the wrong word

A word may be mildly inapposite and do more damage to the piece than a word that is wildly out of keeping with the whole.

an excuse but not a good one

The form made me do it.

no chance

One of the sad things, I have come to think, about making Literature an academic subject is that it doesn’t really give poetry a chance. What poetry has to offer us isn’t easily handled in examinations; everything else about it—formal aspects, tendencies, sources, biographical indications…the trivia, the incidentals of the enterprise—alack, most distractingly, are.

—I. A. Richards, "The Future of Reading," The Written Word (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)

book count

One of those poets who had more published books than readers.

slash and burn

I think the best poets get more satisfaction from striking whole lines and stanzas than from the composition of same.

no performance required

Performance cannot enhance a good poem but it may elevate a lesser one.

tripping hazard

Tripped up by the poem's title.

mystery first

In the composition of poetry mystery must be foremost and then mastery follows after.

colossus means

A colossal heroism: order of excess, triumph over formlessness: “For the primitive Greek, colossus does not mean size, but figuration, a little doll could be colossal if it achieved its figuration, if it triumphed over the formlessness. A superior order of excess, a new creationist order of man and of the gods.” (“Homenaje a René Portocarrero,” 1962). To conceive formlessness, according to Lezama, means following the trace of becoming that goes “from a nebula to the cosmos.” More than imposing a form on the formlessness, a sense of finality, we must crown it, capture it without stopping it, and allow it to reach its best sense at the moment it escapes.

—from the introduction to A Poetic Order of Excess: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Green Integer Press, 2019) by José Lezama Lima, edited and translated by James Irby and Jorge Brioso

fall out

I don’t fall in line with 5-7-5, but I won’t resist a haiku that happens to fall out into that pattern.

respect the blank page

Poet, have respect for the blank page.

no pets

He had no pets but many beloved books.

killer lines

Killer first line. Killer final line. The rest of the poem will fall into place.

note for a new year

There is nothing like a new poem.

vow of silence

For us, Bob Kaufman, was an avatar of sorts—an incarnation of poetry, or perhaps more accurately, it’s most useful, impure form, complete with a sense of music and line that can be hard to find….He was so dedicated to poetry that he didn’t write it down; he was so much a poet that he committed a vow of silence for ten years, from Kennedy’s assassination to the end of the Vietnam War.

—Kevin Young, “Broken Giraffe: Bob Kaufman, the Song, and the Silence,” The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012)

pre-encrypted

For many poems it would be unnecessary to put them in an encrypted file.

better in prose

A poet who was doing something in poetry that could be better done in prose.

markson notes

Leopardi came from a noble family and was educated by a private tutor. By the time Leopardi reached the age of twelve, his tutor resigned his position because he realized the boy’s learning was already greater than his own.

Nearly every morning of his life Paul Valéry wrote in a notebook—totaling 261 notebooks in the end. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”

Delmore Schwartz stated that Moby Dick was not noticed at all for the first seventy years after it was published.

[After David Markson's not novels]

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.