many rooms

The poem has many rooms, corridors, and closets.

a new york school poet

A New York School poet seems convinced his random musings and casual observations are more interesting than your (the reader's) stray thoughts, sightings and overhearings.

locked within the dictionary

I saw the poem locked within the dictionary, and I cut away until it was set free. (after Michelangelo)

always astonished

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. I loved to admire the beauty of things, to trace the imperceptible through the minute the poetic soul of the universe.

—Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished (City Lights Books, 1988), translated by Edwin Honig

my best professors

My best professors were proprietors of used bookshops.

'surrhetorical' poetry

The poetry of Gertrude Stein could be called ‘surrhetorical’.

yard-sale poetry

Yard-sale poetry: The page casually arrayed with things from someone’s life.

one reader

A book with one reader: the person who proofread it.

what is the good of critiquing a forest

I have a friend who has an early Leaves of Grass edition and
inscribed on the flyleaf, in Whitman's hand, is this quote:

"We critique a palace or a cathedral, but what is the good of critiquing a
forest?"

lexical magic

The poem as lexical magic.

knot of language

And a tidy well-tied knot of language it was.

form's nadir

Form’s nadir: A trivial form like the acrostic.

that damn line again

[F]requently in the course of delivering himself of a poem, a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble—a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.

—E. B. White, “Unzip the Veil,” ONE MAN’S MEAT, p146

title exceeding

The poem exhausted itself trying to keep up with the promise of its title.

they aren't avant-garde

Those who have to claim to be avant-garde, aren't.

critical path through the poem

No unnecessary or inert nodes of words: Solve for and find the critical path through the poem.

substitution of terms

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

The safest general characterization of the European poetical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Homer.

a poem that travels light

I dream of a poem so brief and memorable, so engaging and spirited, that it will forever elude print—it will travel light from mouth to mind, mind to mouth, without ever being pinned to a page as text.

gathering storm of whispers

All the whispers gathered round and rose into crescendo.

a tidepool

A poem should be like a tidepool: A small window of water filled with wondrous things, a flux of colors and textures, giving one a glimpse into the immensity of the sea.

living in poetry

That’s what I shall call living in poetry: prolonging the real not by the fantastic, the marvelous, images of paradise, but by trying to live what is concrete in its true dimension, living one’s daily life in what one might call, perhaps, the epic of the real.

To define the verb to live would be a whole philosophy. And nothing at all.

We can amuse ourselves defining poetry, but we do not define sensations.

—Guillevic
Living in Poetry: Interviews with Guillevic,translated from the French by Maureen Smith(The Dedalus Press, 1999) p. 11

without forensic criticism

It doesn’t take forensic criticism to tell if the poem was written in blood.

overburdening fruit

Like the limbs of an orchard tree, you could see the strain in the lines and almost hear them creak with the overburdening fruit of so many adjectives.

act of disbelief

In contemporary society to write a poem is an act of disbelief.

poetry in its street clothes

Prose poem: The language of poetry in its street clothes.

effigy and shadow

Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.

—Antonin Artaud, preface to The Theatre and its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards

slip it under the tongue

Short poem: So easy to slip under the tongue, to smuggle into silence.

perpetual emotion machine

To think of the poem as a perpetual emotion machine.

the tongue refuses to lie still

Reading the poem silently my tongue refused to lie still in my mouth.

to lose your notebook

To lose your notebook feels as though a vital organ has been taken from your body.

sound of a blindman's cane striking

Just back from Germany, I thought I'd post something by a German poet...

I write poems to orient myself in reality. I view them as trigonometric points or buoys that mark a course in an unknown area. Only through writing do things take on reality for me. Reality is my goal, not my presupposition. First, I must establish it.
[...]
Let us use the word “definition” for these trigonometric signs. Such definitions are not only useful for the writer but it is absolutely necessary that he set them up. In each good line of poetry I hear the cane of the blindman striking: I am on secure ground now.

—Gunter Eich, "Some Remarks on 'Literature and Reality',”
Valuable Nail: Selected Poems of Gunter Eich,
Oberlin College Press, 1981, translated by Stuart Freibert

a poem equal to architecture

A poem should have a social function equal that of architecture. The poem as a beautiful form of habitable human space.

poem from there to the end

No matter at what point one entered the poem, it was a poem from there to the end.

an infinitely small vocabulary

A perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

—Jack Spicer, "Lorca Letters"

poet laureate of anywhere & everywhere

The Poet Laureate of the Corner Store; The Poet Laureate of Greenland; The Poet Laureate of Half-Past Ten O’Clock; The Poet Laureate of I-10; The Poet Laureate of the Burning Trash Barrel; The Poet Laureate of Wal-Mart; The Poet Laureate of Leap Year; The Poet Laureate of Las Vegas; The Poet Laureate of Pinehurst Golf Course; The Poet Laureate of Fairhaven Cemetery; The Poet Laureate of LAX; The Poet Laureate of the Moon. It’s such an honor to be named Poet Laureate…

more mass

Some poems seem to accrete mass with each rereading.

cheese graters

The fashion for fragments: Another poet who has taken a cheese grater to his brain. Can you not synthesize, configure, integrate or make whole?

leaves a scar

A great line of poetry leaves a scar in time.

enemy of decoration

Seferis quotes Cavafy’s critics…
“Cavafy's method is always to use the most frugal and anti-poetic phrase for the expression of his poetic ideas.” He is “the implacable enemy of any kind of decoration.”

Then Seferis says…
There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to become prose.” No one has ever gone farther in this direction. He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know…

—George Seferis, “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” On the Greek Style, translated by Rex Warner (Little Brown, 1966)

word weeds

Word weeds: some beautiful in their scattered, untamed glory; others thick and choking out the poetry’s fullest flowering.

box or old barn

Even a poem that closes, as Yeats said, like a box clicking shut, is open in many ways…reading it is like being inside an old barn with many missing boards and shingles, the light streaming in from many directions.

free-roam romance

The poem was all horses running on a beach, manes catching sunlight against surf…all that free-roam romance.

poets mistaken about love

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience; which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

—Hannah Arendt, "Action," ch. 33 (footnote), The Human Condition (1958)

uneasily reconciled polarities

A superior metaphor is made of uneasily reconciled polarities.

strop them upon your tongue

Like an itinerant knife sharpener, the poet should try to find words in need of a good honing. And, if need be, he should strop them on his tongue a few times until they have a bright new edge.

no match for verisimilitude

The imagination is no match for verisimilitude.

narrative at risk

The poet will always put the narrative at risk in favor of arresting images and felicitous sounds.

silent poetry

Painting is often called "silent poetry," Wushengshi, and thought of as a way of releasing feelings that need not, or sometimes could not, be put into words. Huang Tingjian,a great eleventh-century calligrapher, wrote of painter Li Gonglin:

Duke Li has verses which he doesn't want to throw out,
So with light ink he "writes" them down as silent poetry.

From the The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry & Calligraphy by Michael Sullivan (George Braziller, revised edition '99)

all poems are political

In contemporary society, to write a poem is a political act.

makes a physical impression

Though entirely made of words, the poem somehow makes a physical impression on one’s life.

web of belief

The poem as a 'web of belief’. (after Quine)

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.