to incite a caring

One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god. Yet its very openness often signifies indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiqués, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite a caring.

—John Berger, “The Hour of Poetry,” Selected Essays (Vintage, 2001)

far too puny

Language was far too puny for his great theology:
But, oh! His thought strode through those words
Bright as the conquering Christ…

—Thomas Merton, from “Duns Scotus,” The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1980)

creative writing

The creative writing professor crafted lovely glowing introductions for the famous visiting writers.

sweet spiel

Poet, be a salesperson with a sweet spiel and a hard close.

jailbreak

Ruled notebook: Frustrated, I turn it on its side and begin to write. The words hanging on the bars of the cage, biding their time for a jailbreak.

what books are made of

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt plura mala, quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber.

Here you'll read some good things, some so-so, and a number of bad. There’s not another way, Avitus, to make a book.

—Martial, Epigrammata, XV, 16

singing in between

In the lyric even the interstices sing.

one look

A poet gazes the world in the glance of a single line.

low-yield process

The refining into language of what was raw imagination.

craftwork

What some call craft I’d call a taking care.

poet game

I watched my country turn into
a coast-to-coast strip mall
and I cried out in a song:
if we could do all that in thirty years,
then please tell me you all -
why does good change take so long?
Why does the color of your skin
or who you choose to love
still lead to such anger and pain?
And why do I think it's any help
for me to still dream of
playing the poet game?

—Greg Brown, "The Poet Game" (Red House Records, 1994)

everyone's doing it

Everyone reads fiction but everyone writes poetry.

unruly

The lyric obeys no rules: emotions unleashing the language from the laws of usage and semantic convention.

fragile lines

As though written on tissue paper the poem felt as if it could come apart at any moment.

usual suspect

The poet had opportunity and motif.

strange terms

Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.

—Titus Lucretius Carus, “Of The Nature Of Things”
(translation by Wm. Ellery Leonard)

language algebra

The line was language algebra: a formula devoid of the phenomenal.

skin deep

A test for a line of poetry: Could you live with these words as a tattoo?

organizing principle

A word array that must ultimately well up as speech.

ruined beauty

Classicism achieves its beauty as it is abraded and rubbed away, when it falls into ruin.

the bird, the flower, the tree

Intuition can only operate by an immediate contact with the thing. In poetry what in logic are called subjective and objective are united. There is no observer and thing observed, both are one; the poet is the bird, the flower, the tree, the Pope (Browning in “The Ring and the Book”), the ship (Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner”), and anything else to which he is able to join himself. And if this union does not take place there can be no poetry.

—Michael Oakeshott, “Philosophy, Poetry and Reality”, What is History? (Imprint Academic, 2004)

to preserve the pure

To try to hold oneself apart from the institutional inertia and those internecine critical forces that beset the pure spirit of what poetry is.

handmade kite

Write the poem on a handmade kite. Let the kite be lifted high & far in the wind…then cut the string.

Horace inscription

“Decant your wine” (I.11) but
always “cherish the golden mean.” (II.10)

After his reading of The Odes of Horace (The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2008), the above was inscribed to me by the translator Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz.

overheard in nature

A poem overheard in nature.

crow words

Insolent as crows the letters perched there on the ruled lines of the notebook.

nonpareil line

The nonpareil line annuls all before it. So you must strike the others, and start over.

tradition not by habit

As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoroughly considered. The historical comparisons chosen are part of a continuous tradition relevant to my concerns. When Eliot writes about tradition, his comments are equally relevant to architecture, notwithstanding the more obvious changes in architectural methods due to technological innovations. “In English writing,” Eliot says, “we seldom speak of tradition…Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to a work approved, of some pleasing archeological reconstruction…Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged…Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor…”

—Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966)

self-explanatory

I’ve never felt there was a reason to explain my love for poetry.

recasts experience

The poetic image that forever recasts one’s experience of reality.

order of the day

Only this: Ever try to avoid the obvious.

letterpress to the rescue

There is nothing like seeing a display of fine letterpress books and broadsheets, the simple & elegant designs, the almost palpable fonts, the textures and muted colors of the beautiful papers, to restore one’s faith in poetry in its purest sense. Even slight discolorations at the edges of pages, or the fading of some of the text, reminds you of what it was that first drew you to the art of poetry.

like cams

The words like cams rising to do their work as the line turns in the mind.

pressed into service

Small press poetry publishing: socialized self-publication.

boule de neige

Perhaps poetry, or at least lyric poetry, may be characterized by the two central illusions that define the nature of a boule de neige: the still moment disturbed into being (a wash of images across the reader’s eye), and the following slow contraction of time as consciousness settles back into place (for what does the snowfall signify, except the poignant rhythms of a dreaming mind?).

Looking back, I suspect it’s a similar experience of time that first attracted me to poetry, and I doubt if over the years the original attraction has changed very much. What I loved then, I love now, is that aura of heightened animation with which poetry tends to surround itself (the syllables of a line of verse like the snowfall of the boule de neige)—as if, not the atmosphere, but the subject itself were momentarily stirred to life. As if the mind might actually sustain that life.

—Sherod Santos, “An Art of Poetry: Postscript to Abandoned Railway Station’,“ What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry (Gibbs-Smith, 1995), edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill

Bernoulli's principle

If a fluid is flowing horizontally and along a section of a streamline, where the speed increases it can only be because the fluid on that section has moved from a region of higher pressure to a region of lower pressure; and if its speed decreases, it can only be because it has moved from a region of lower pressure to a region of higher pressure. Consequently, within a fluid flowing horizontally, the highest speed occurs where the pressure is lowest, and the lowest speed occurs where the pressure is highest. (cited from Wikipedia)
--
A line of poetry obeys this dynamic.

never mind

Laughable now to think that surrealists, like Breton, believed ‘automatic writing’ was actually possible.

visibly bad

The New Yorker always publishes crappy poems until it publishes yours.

beginning and end

To write each line as though it was both the first and the final line of the poem.

blurbs in the bag

What are the odds? Spots for four blurbs on the back of a book of poems, and all are positively glowing. How lucky is that?

chocolate

The first notion I had that writing is not the registration of one’s comings and goings came with my reading, at about eighteen, of Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” in some anthology. What I remember of that poem is the thrill of the word “chocolate” muscular and solitary on the page. This was not chocolate, but a manifestation of the poet’s arrogant appropriation of anything. The word virtually sailed free of all connections.

—Gilbert Sorrentino, “Writing and Writers: Disjecta Membra,” Something Said (Dalkey Archive Press, 2001)

lean and well-seen

Poetry as the laconic iconic.

extrapolate

Sometimes the poet must extrapolate from the poem’s known vocabulary to find the word or words needed to complete the line.

paradox of the one-off

When a work is sui generis it becomes less useful as a model to latter poets. It’s too tight a box, leaving no elbow room for the followers, marking as merely derivative all their attempts to creatively employ its attributes.

winter view

Winter View

If this were a rooftop
covered with snow,
these words
would be
bird tracks
instead
of a poem.

—William Michaelian, Winter Poems (Cosmopsis Books, 2007)

trust too much

You trust your art too much.

without words

The terror and promise of a fresh notebook.

trace elements

Trace elements of your first poem present in your last.

free as in free of

Free verse poetics is based on the immediacy and robust resources of prose itself. By eschewing both traditional/formalist artifices (regular meter and/or rime scheme) and the typographically disjointed arrays of projective verse, free verse avoids the verbal distraction of excessive mediation and visual display.

Tolstoy as the fox

If we may recall once again our divisions of artists into foxes and hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equaled, but he believed only in one vast unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling—the degree of its ‘oscillation’, the ebb and flow, the minute movements[…]—the inner and outer texture and ‘feel’ of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations. The celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person in [Tolstoy’s] world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were: never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an impressionistic representation...but always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space—an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated.

—Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”

skiffle language

The poem as ‘skiffle’ language: scrounged, improvised, vagrant.

no brakes

Blew right through that line break.

in the desert of theory

Listen hard enough and you can hear prophet poets chanting, singing, raving out in the desert of theory. Nothing out there was created to hear them.

unnecessary elective surgery

How often when we revise are we performing elaborate cosmetic surgery on a corpse?

first, second and third poetry

The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art into one thing.

—Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist.

typographical f/x

All that typographical f/x without an engaging text.

word clouds

All poems begin as ‘word clouds’ in the mind.

water-boarded into silence

You have to snatch a poet off the street, hastily escort him to an undisclosed location, and then water-board him, in order to make him stop spouting poetry.

creative dynamic

As imagination tests mimesis, in turn mimesis bests imagination.

wordum wrixlan

Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan—to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric forms in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse.

—Seth Lerer, “Caedmon Learns to Sing,” Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007)

ghost in the machine

Poetry: software written in a programming language for the human soul.

power phrase

The rhetorical power of a single phrase comprised of a short Anglo-Saxon word and a long Latinate word.

unfounded sounds

No reason but for sound they should have entered my mind together: The Clash’s “London Calling” and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.”

break silence

A poem that could make a Cistercian break silence.

so over

The moment it was a movement it was over.

spot in the iris

263. Imagine someone pointing to a spot in the iris in a face by Rembrandt and saying, “the wall in my room should be painted this colour.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Remarks on Colour, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Translated by Linda L. McAlister & Margarete Schättle.
(U. of California Press)

good shave

Faced with scraggly and unkempt poetry one is tempted to reach for Ockham’s razor to give it a good shave.

desperate struggle

The poem is a desperate struggle between release and resolve.

block/blank

Caught between a block and a blank place.

perspective

The commonplace observed closely from an odd angle.

not a luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

word horde

Poet, be a great Khan of language, gathering your word horde just over the horizon of consciousness.

purified speech

A form of purified speech that is not a prayer.

beautiful labyrinth

In 2004 Raymond Danowski donated 75,000 volumes of poetry to the Emory University library. Reports at the time said the collection would fill several tractor-trailers. I want to get lost in those stacks someday and not come out of that beautiful labyrinth for about a year.

ink or pixels

In ink or pixels, it’s all the same.