scrimshaw

How important was that image?: As though a kind of scrimshaw etched on human bone.

flarf = word barf

Flarf is word barf. A glorified writing exercise, as if the world needed another
reason or method to perpetrate bad poems. (It’s no coincidence that ‘flarfing’ arose at the same time the ‘paradelle', Billy Collins’ pet form, had its day.) Has anything of lasting interest ever been created by an artist absent a compelling subject or profound emotion? Silence should be a satisfying alternative to the poet who hasn’t any reason to write.

clarity, clarity

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
        thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity

—George Oppen, from “Route”

first love in translation

We fall hard for the first translations of a poet's work that we encounter; and most of the other/later translations we come across strike us as pale or somehow inferior.

simple lay

They may call it a simple lay, and yet the words won’t lie still.

arbitrary & capricious linebreak

A casual survey of contemporary poetry would lead one to believe that the decision of how/where to break the poetic line is either arbitrary or idiosyncratic. There is much workshop talk but little real theory or even practical guidelines to rely on when considering the linebreak. One could say that the linebreak is arbitrary and capricious as they put it in the law.

hate the approximate

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

wide and close up

A poet’s vision is always wide-angle yet with a high degree of acuity.

dictionary thumper

Poet, be a dictionary-thumping fundamentalist!

an anthology's function

An anthology is for finding a few representative poems by minor poets. Large collected and selected poems are the go-to source for the bigger names. Do you read Ginsberg or Creeley in an anthology? Perhaps just a quick check of the contents page to see which poems were chosen. But generally we skip the big names in favor of sampling those poets whose work is less familiar or less widely available.

a blurb is about

A blurb is about the blurb-writer and not about the book.

nobly disheveled

Any bright young man can be taught to be artful. It is impossible to teach taste, but you can teach most anybody caution. It is always the lesser artists who are artful, they must learn their trade by rote. They must be careful never to make false steps, never to speak out of a carefully synthesized character. The greatest poetry is nobly disheveled. At least it never shows the scars of taking care.

—Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to D.H. Lawrence: Selected Poems

roaring loom of time

I would steal Spinoza’s image of the “roaring loom of time’ and state that this is what a great poem eventually becomes.

barbarian poets

Going back to the Greek meaning of the word ‘barbarian’ (those who speak a language other than Greek), we can see that all poets are ‘barbarians’ because they speak a different language from the main tribe or polis. The difference can range from a matter of dialect or inflection to a speech that is radically different in terms of word sounds, meanings, syntax, and diction.

simultaneous tapestry

In a poem the lines strain to weave themselves into a simultaneous tapestry of experience.

unselfish act

Translation is the most unselfish act in literature, and must be so.

singularity

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture on a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

—Basil Bunting, The Codex

command economy

Poetry publishing is a decentralized command economy. Demand is not considered in production.

bandoleer

He wore a bandoleer filled with pencils and pens. Always ready for a good write.

prose mind

It’s not possible to read poetry with a prose mind.

pressured speech

The poem as pressured speech.

undoing the damage of haste

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

—Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke

art deco ditties

If not for his philosophical and aesthetic interests, Wallace Stevens might have composed only art deco ditties.

placeholders

The words in the line were merely placeholders, entities deployed without the efficacy of language.

original or aboriginal

The poet too often grasps for the original, when s/he should be attempting to reach back into the mind’s aboriginal state.

spectacle of speech

The poem as spectacle of speech.

half-done or whole

#14

In poetry, too, all that is whole might only be half-done, and yet all half-done might actually be a whole.

(Literary Aphorisms, 1797-1800)

—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms, Behler & Struc, trans., Penn. State U. Press, 1968

mind bridge

The image is a mind bridge back to experience.

Plato knew us

Plato knew us to be those idle liars composing idylls upon our lyres.

poetic fecundity

The poet struggles to stay ahead of the poetic fecundity of slang and idiom.

not plague or pandemic

Poetry is not an art form for the mass-media age. It doesn’t create instant hysteria as does a plague or pandemic. Poetry travels quietly and slowly, gradually infecting that portion of the populace predisposed to its life-altering influence.

the mark left is poetry

We forget so easily everything we read.
The mark left is poetry, causes changes in

movement of life.

(entry March 5th, 1963)

Aim for a whole new way of using language. There should be
no artificial abbreviations (of sentences, etc.) in poetry.
Closer to the mind it comes out how? Or the mind closer
to the poem, comes out with its own good poetry.

(entry March 15th, 1963)

I don’t want to force my mind to be clever or force
it to poetry.
What are those other poets talking about.
Is language for speaking or writing,

using or making

(entry August 11th, 1963)

--Joanne Kyger, Strange Big Moon, The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964,
North Atlantic Book, 2000

poem's test

Test for a poem: No words needed to introduce it and none would help explain it.

content over concept

A poem of concept is generally lesser in weight than a poem of content.

poet's poet

Every poet is a poet’s poet. The audience for serious poetry being comprised largely of other poets.

critic's test

I’m an able critic because I’ve written a sufficient amount of bad poetry.

fig leaf poetry

Le vers alexandrin n’est souvent qu’un cache-sottise.

The alexandrine is most often a fig leaf over stupidity.

—Stendahl (Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), Racine et Shakespeare.

lyric nodes, inert matrix

The epic or long poem consists of coruscating lyric nodes locked within an essentially inert matrix.

falling silent

Fall silent so as to gather strength, summoning the power to speak.

the published poem

To publish is to acknowledge the social function and use of poetry.

hard reading

Poetry is hard reading.

specific point-to-point vividness

Much of his [Stefan Zweig’s] prose rhythm is poetic in the raw sense of being laid out with the specific point-to-point vividness of verse. Often you will find Zweig writing a clause that could match to a line by Rilke.

--Clive James, “Stefan Zweig,” Cultural Amnesia

(I first encountered Zweig’s incredibly lucid prose in his book Erasmus of Rotterdam…I can only imagine how well he reads in German.)

existence elucidated

Poetry is existence elucidated by means of the imagination.

proving ground

The public reading as the proving ground for the poem.

basic formal constraint

The basic formal constraint in contemporary poetry is the width (8.5’’) and length (11”) of a standard-size sheet of paper, along with its typical margin widths.

first and final line

Write each line as though it was the first and final line of the poem.

two kinds of poetry

Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then.

—Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (Columbia University Press. © 2007)

tome is tomb

For a poet, tome is tomb.

shelved and thus held dear

After I read the book, I put it in my small library; shelved and thus held dear. Could the author ask for any other tribute?

with a dog's ears

It’s well known that dogs can hear sounds inaudible to human ears. A good reader can sense words and phrases not present in the poem but only adumbrated by their absence.

secular prayer

The poem as secular prayer.

enter at your own risk

Poetry is not a fiefdom or a private domain. It is a city whose gates stand wide; which has never exactly welcomed its newcomers but has always found room for them.

—Eavan Boland, Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1994

iambs on the march

The jackbooted iambs are marching again in their ranks of five.

strains at its tether

The line strains at its tether: Can you sense the tug of a line that has reached its optimal length?

threadbare cloth

A poem of abstractions is a threadbare cloth.

not silence but white noise

Some have called the empty space around the words a kind of silence. But it's the white noise of all the words trying to enter the poem, words clamoring to be heard, text struggling to make itself visible.

It's Chinatown

Sometimes when faced with difficult or complex poetry, the detective’s words to Jake Gittes at the end of the movie Chinatown come to mind: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

drenched in words

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come . . . they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit.

—Hart Crane,The Letters of Hart Crane, November 26, 1921

meaning over matter and sound

The materiality of text is slight. The acoustic effects of language are dismal compared to those of music. Thus, no one is much interested in words devoid of their meanings.

cheap gunsel

Certain critics are like cheap gunsels: A guy who when he can’t talk his way out of a sticky situation, reaches too quickly for his 'canon', and just starts blasting away with ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Milton’.

audacious yet convincing

The metaphor/simile should open with audacity causing disbelief and close convincingly with a felt truth.

resists demystification

Much to a critic’s dismay, true poetry resists all manner of demystification.

apt rather than exact

In a poem, the expression may be apt rather than exact.

poet's first obligation

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

words working against the poem

In an odd way the words are often working against the poem.

too late for that last line

You expected that that last line would save all it followed?

mission of art

It is the mission of art to remind man that he is human.

—Ben Shahn (quoted in Karsh, 50 Year Retrospective, photographer Yousuf Karsh)

multitudinous yet unified

The poem was multitudinous in aspect, yet unified in its effect.

expert at excerpts

A critic can be judged by the expertness of his/her excerpting.

anchor word

Look for an anchor word in each line of the poem. If a line lacks a word of significant weight, then that line is not advancing the poem.

reanimates remembrance

Imagery reanimates remembrance.

sonic stitching

Meter: the sonic stitching that holds fast the seam of the line.

language in extremis

The poem as language in extremis.

kaleidosonic

The poem was ‘kaleidosonic’.

everything for depth & height

One complaint lodged against Sappho—it is lodged against Emily Dickinson too, and that tells us something about the complaint—is that her range is narrow. Even if the charge could be proved correct, and it cannot, we would want to remember that lyric poetry cares very little for breadth and width, everything for depth and height. Whatever the mysterious criteria for great European lyric may be, compression, intensity of feeling, and complexity and subtlety of reflection are surely high among them.

—W.R. Johnson, The Idea of the Lyric, U. of California Press, 1982 (p. 48)