necessarily brief and flashing apparitions

“…the fragment understood as a new genre, perhaps the only genre of our time, a legitimate and self-sufficient expression of the lyric moment, the product of a poetics which does not wish to mix the necessarily brief and flashing apparitions of poetry with elements of a different, voluntary nature.”

—Eugenio Montale, “On the Poetry of [Dino] Campana,” (1942), Second Life of Art, Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale (Ecco Press, 1982), translated by Jonathan Galassi

lyrical eschatology

Poetry = lyrical eschatology

first line like a fuse

Poet, light your first line like a fuse!

nice title

Inadvertent insult in front of a painting: “Nice frame.” After reading a poem: “Nice title.”

gestalts glitter

The phenomenological power of both metaphor and thisness derives from an awareness of an extreme tension between being and time. Thisness is the lyric comprehension of this tension; an instant of time opens to embrace the resonance of all that is; time is present, but suspended--held in balance. Metaphor, by contrast, is a form of domestic understanding: wholeness overrides morality, but does not erase it. The distinction of things remains the foundation of their resonant connexion. In metaphor, gestalts glitter: those inflected by being and time, flashing back and forth over the hinge of what is common.

—Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, #67

unapparent harmony

Heraklitas states "an unapparent harmony is more powerful than an obvious one." And so it is with all superior metaphors in poetry.

a ballot cast

To write a political poem is to cast a ballot in ongoing, open-ended referendum on the future of the world.

no rung below you

Sometimes when you come to the end of a line, you have that sensation of stepping down a ladder and feeling for a moment that there is no other rung below, that you’ll be left to dangle in space.

Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash

"I don't have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind."--Wallace Stevens.

Tonight I'm introducing the poet Lawrence Joseph who will be delivering an address entitled: "The Poet and The Lawyer: The Example of Wallace Stevens." The event is the annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, put on by the Hartford Public Library and The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

attended to on many levels

In a poem, the words ask to be attended to on many levels.

second most important writing instrument

Second in importance to a poet’s favored writing instrument is the wastebasket.

less is core

For a poet, 'less is core'. If I can't say it in a page, I can't say it.

the poet's Rubicon

When reading a great poem, see if you can tell which line was the poet’s Rubicon.

perfectly balanced, expertly weighted

A poem so perfectly balanced and expertly weighted with words that at the end of the poem one felt an urge to read it backwards, half-expecting the same experience and pleasure.

Walt's truth

I come next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank—I believe it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

—Robt. Louis Stevenson, “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” from Essays On The Art of Writing

survives a misquoting

A good line of poetry can easily survive a partial misquoting.

pharmacological language

The poem as pharmacological language.

the other side of originality

When he claims to be solitary, the artist lulls himself in a perhaps faithful illusion, but the privilege he grants himself is not real. When he thinks he is expressing himself spontaneously, creating an original work, he is answering other past or present, actual or potential creators. Whether he knows it or not, one never walks alone along the path of creativity.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, quoted in “The Artist as Critic,” Every Force Evolves a Form by Guy Davenport

the retinue and the slave

The prose writer attends the retinue that is language. As one enslaved, the poet lies prostrate before each passing word.

exposes, expounds, propounds

Theory at first exposes, then expounds, and finally propounds; and in that last phase it becomes an insidious enterprise.

poem made of poems

Reading the Classical fragments one is struck by the fact that any poem is perhaps no more than a conglomeration of smaller ‘poems’. The ideal would be that any passage excerpted from a poem could stand alone as a poem.

peri-perspicacious

A critic should be 'periperspicacious'.

tabula rasa

Something there is (in a poet) that doesn’t love tabula rasa. That makes one desire to take up pen as though it were a sharp nail and to scratch his or her name, in so many, many words, into that blank tablet.

substitution of terms

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

—Bertrand Russell (1872-1969), Mysticism and Logic

Poetics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

simple theater

I find great enjoyment at a poetry reading because it is the simplest form of theater: A poet, a lectern or sidetable to hold books or papers, enough light to read by, a bottle of water, and perhaps a microphone and amplifier if the acoustics of the space are poor or the voice of the particular poet doesn’t carry. The audience arrayed in several ranks of chairs (but seldom are more than 50 seats required). That’s it. No cast, costumes or props, no musical instruments, no projector or screen, no flashing or colored lights, just the human voice commanding the attention of a room full of people.

footnote to a poem

A footnote to a poem is either an affectation or it is the failure of a word or line to hold its own against time.

old tricks

Ah, the avant-garde, up to their old tricks again.

accident and argument

A poem is part welcome accident and part crafted argument.

disturbing intrusion of elements

“I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me. The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate the form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted. I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest. I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.”

—Edward Hopper, “Notes on Painting,” 1933, MOMA exhibit catalogue

solved before one's eyes

Sometimes as one reads it is as though the words are still slotting themselves into place just as the eye reaches them. The poem as a puzzle being solved before one's eyes.

procrustean

All form is procrustean. The paradox of form: what is de rigueur often leads to revelation.

image of note

When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.
I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”

[I admire the way Bishop has deftly connected auditory and visual elements in this image.]

switching yard

The poem was a vast switching yard of word-freighted lines and digressive sidetracks.

thrall language

The poem as "thrall language."

always writing about two things

One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject.

—Wallace Stevens, "The Irrational Element in Poetry" (OP 227).

a ping in the universe

A poem is a ping in the universe whose sender cares not if it hits anything and echoes back.

so as to record

Written so as to record; but read for its art.

harnessing forces

In art, and in painting as in music, it’s not a question of reproducing or inventing forms, but of harnessing forces.”

—Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, p. 39

impasto

The nouns, through meaning and sound, give the poem a texture not unlike ‘impasto’ in painting.

epigraph exceeding

How often it is the case that the factoid or quote that serves as epigraph for a poem overshadows and exceeds what follows.

incorrigible line

A line of poetry should be incorrigible. Not a single word or syllable could be altered without diminishment.

integral

Only the language that is integral.

sharp or faint footprint

For what it may be worth, in my own experience, a poem appears as a kind of footprint—as sharp as the one Crusoe saw or as faint as a ghost fossil in stone—but always solitary and iconic: an image, a phrase or a rhyme that is like a bit of music seeking words.

—Thomas McGrath, "Notes, Personal and Theoretical on 'Free' and 'Traditional' Form," Poetry East, #20-21, 1986

distance between language and experience

A poem matters most in that moment when it closes or collapses the distance between language and experience.

sleep is work

For a poet even sleep is work.

stolen or by chance

If what I do prove well, it won't advance.
They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.

—Anne Bradstreet, The Prologue

poem you should never have started

The poem you should never have started is the only poem you must finish.

to ruthlessly insinuate time

Time is the text’s only enemy. The text must ruthlessly insinuate the thoughtless continuum that is time.

first failed translation

The poem in its original language is the first failed "translation" (of the poet's motive or vision for it).

not everything is poetry

In every piece of music, not everything is music, and in every poem not everything is poetry.

—Joseph Joubert, Notebooks (translated by Paul Auster)

language alchemy

In the alchemy of language that is poem-making, gold is the elusive element. So, in that pseudo-science of trial and error, we must trust the errors.

to define is to defend

One’s definition of poetry is one’s defense of poetry.

6 lines

Certain critics (Wm. Logan comes to mind) operate using the “Richelieu Principle”…they’ll readily hang a poet on as few as six lines:

"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

—Cardinal et Duc de Richelieu (1585–1642) French clergyman, noble, and statesman

illusion of a higher reality

The primary problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Truth and Poetry"

durable goods

Books are my durable goods. And my favorite major appliance: a bookcase.

ordinary and rare words

What matters in writing, I think, is that the ordinary word seems to be used for the first time, and the rare one seems ordinary, so that one doesn't stumble over it and no word feels strange or wrong, wherever it is placed.

—Juan Ramon Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: The Poetics of Work, ed. Christopher Maurer (Doubleday, 1997), p. 147

thoroughbred books

The difference between the titles given to poetry books and the names that thoroughbred owners give their horses is growing indistinct.

old battle flag

Their manifesto was an old battle flag trotted out with some new dyes and hastily embroidered emblems.

chapel of words

Reading a small poem: entering a chapel of words.

flawless and boring

A flawless poem is often a boring poem—I want to marvel at the most outlandish, overreaching mistakes.

so far ahead as to seem behind

...poetry, which is generally ahead of its time, may go so far ahead as to seem behind in time.

—Eugenio Montale, Poet in Our Time, translated by Alastair Hamilton (Marion Boyars, 1976)

petty verities

Without truth the work rings hollow; yet petty verities impair a piece’s power.

pentecostal pro mundi

Poet, be a pentecostal pro mundi!

jackstraws

Revision: like in the game of jackstraws, if a single phrase is taken rashly from the construct of the poem, the whole structure of the piece collapses into loose straw.

last stand of the metaphysicians

Poetry is the last stand of the metaphysicians.

the destinies of speech

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

in the wake of a poem

Awash in the wake of language that is a poem, one knows what kind of vessel was the mind that cut through the blank sea of the page. It may be too far to catch sight of now, or be shrouded in fog, but one knows the craft: Be it an ocean liner, sailboat, trawler, cigarette boat or just a dinghy with a small outboard motor.

not over when you've heard the last word

Only a poor poem is over when the you’ve heard the last word or close the pages of the book.

poetry's purpose

Poetry presupposes its purpose.

paradoxically more personal

The impersonal style that thwarts the reader's access to the poet's point of view and narrative intention is paradoxically more idiosyncratic and personal than the poem that allows the reader to share the poet's meanings and moods.

no need for praise

He who is sure, absolutely sure of having produced a viable and lasting work, has no more interest in praise, and he feels himself beyond glory, because he is a creator and knows it, and the joy he derives from it is divine.

—Henri Bergson, The Sources of Morality and Religion

healthy disregard for grammar

A poet should have a healthy disregard for grammar.

that line

The line for which the rest of the poem exists.

towering crag

The best line is a towering crag.
It won't be woven into an ordinary song.
The mind can't find a match for it
but casts about, unwilling to give up.

—Lu Ji, The Act of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996), translated by Tony Barnstone

the seamstress and the butcher

Sometimes the language is in need of a seamstress; other times a butcher is what’s called for.