aphoristic ambitions

Every couplet aspires to aphorism (or epigram). [Thinking of Alexander Pope.]

preempt the prompt

Writing that comes from ‘prompts’ is not going to be important.

particular within universal

Seeing that nearly all the words to be found in the dictionary stand for universals, it is strange that hardly anybody except students of philosophy ever realizes that there are such things as universals. We do not naturally dwell upon those words in a sentence which do not stand for particulars; and if we are forced to dwell upon a word which stands for a universal, we naturally think of it as standing for some one of the particulars that come under the universal.

—Bertand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford Univ. Press, 1959)

blossom in the mind

As I read the poem I could feel the lines unfurl, flowering within the lobes of my brain.

carry forward

Each line carries the memory of the one before.

eclipse event

Metaphor like an eclipse where one object passes over and interposes itself between the observer and the other object, and then a shadow (lunar eclipse) or corona (solar eclipse) appears.

not in the game

Shun those who would make of poetry a word game.

afterimages

A poem bears information whether as a meaning-making entity or as pure experience. When we revise a poem we are often tempted to cut things (eliminate information) after our first reading of the poem which seem to be extraneous or superfluous in retrospect. And yet we can never wipe the mind’s slate clean and experience the poem the way we did in our first reading of it. Certain things may be cut from the poem which will always inform our reading of that poem. These elements remain in the mind even after being deleted from the text. But how will the next ‘first-time reader’ of the poem experience it without these elements? That is the nagging question faced during revision.

solitary lakes

Somewhere there they wait for unwritten poems like solitary lakes that no one sees.

—Anna Kamienska, In That Great River: A Notebook, selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

exhausted enjambment

The prose poem’s ascendency coincided with the exhaustion of the enjambment as a resource for free verse.

veer with verve

The best criticism veers easily back and forth between text and aesthetic assertions.

no beat

Meter was not his métier.

ping pong poet

Another career-track poet careening from reading gigs to writers conferences.

emotion is a verb

Emotion is our greatest primary affectual mode, moving from recollections in tranquility to meditations in emergency, and to speak of emotion as a noun is misleading. It is a verb: feeling, constantly moving, negotiating between the obligation to and liberty from the world, the medium, and instinctual biological as well as philosophical need. Feeling. The preservation of being is an imaginative act.

—Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Graywolf Press, 2010)

uneven line

The incommensurable line that distracts as it attracts.

not for free

A critic who had to buy the books he reviewed. No publisher would send him review copies. [Thinking of William Logan.]

overextended

Seek immediate medical attention for an extended metaphor lasting more than four lines.

all titled poets

All poets have MFAs…now what?

idiot thing

To retrieve [important] subject matter will always mean going out into the “objective” world, sitting “down close to the idiot thing”* and then discovering a rhetoric sufficient to treat of it. The enlarged content, which is the fuel for poetry will, in the hands of our best poets, dictate this rhetoric.

—Jonathan Holden, The Fate of American Poetry (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991)

*excerpt from Scott Cairns’ poem “Harbor Seals” which is featured in the essay.

outside or inside

Do you trust the ‘pure critic’ who doesn’t write in the genre he/she criticizes; or do you put more weight behind the words of the ‘practicing critic’ who may be a bit too cozy in the genre?

exchange value

A poor country whose only currency was words, and thereby poetry was held dear.

title bias

Flipping to the contents page, perusing the titles, how many wonderful poems have I passed over only because they’re saddled with inert or homely titles?

poet without a career

I care most for those poets who don’t care about Poetry. [Thinking of Jack Gilbert.]

with a spoon

With so much music and delicious diction on the tongue, you wanted to read the poem with a spoon. Or to hear it read aloud...because the ear is a kind of spoon.

original image

The original is original and that is that; the image is image and that is that; the two are radically other. But this makes nonsense of an image; it could not be an image without relation to an original, even granted that they are not identical. What is the character of that relation, and how does it effect how we speak of the two “sides” in original communication? We try to fix the original univocally, and we end up making the relation of original and image equivocal; and then not only do claims about the image also become equivocal, but also those made about the original.

—William Desmond, Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art (State U. of New York Press, 2003)

each one save one

I’m comforted by the thought that if I’m ever put under government surveillance the agent who follows me, who monitors my phone calls, who reads my emails and tracks my web-surfing, who searches through the papers in my recycle bin, will learn a lot about poetry. In fact, after two-years on my case, the agent could be awarded an honorary MFA in Poetry.

instead of reviews

I’m sorry your book was not reviewed, but those were some nice blurbs you got.

keen eyed

A good critical reader is like an osprey dropping from the sky to seize with its talons that one careless word lolling at the poem's surface.

thus sprach zenith

Poetry is the apotheosis of speech.

downhill from there

Tripped over that first line and the whole poem was a slo-mo pratfall after that.

deep song

It is rightly called “deep” song, he tells us, because it is “deeper than all the wells and all the seas that surround the world, much deeper than the present heart that creates it and the voice that sings it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from distant races, crossing the cemetery of the years…” Beneath the verses a question throbs, he says, a terrible question without an answer. Life is seen through an impenetrable veil, as if through the eyes of an ancient sibyl or an Andalusian sphinx.

—Edward F. Stanton (quoting Federico Garcia Lorca), Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1978)

page and stage

The perfect combination of page poet and stage poet.


[National Poetry Slam this week in St. Paul.]

make it now

Avant-gardists frequently mistake the word ‘new’ for a value descriptor when it is merely a temporal marker.

prime directive

If MFA programs in creative writing did nothing else creating life-long readers would be a worthy accomplishment.

no other words

As soon as a writer types the phrase ‘in other words’, he should immediately delete that phrase and the whole passage it referred to. One doesn’t translate within the language.

silken line

A poet often does more and better than he is aware at the time, and seems at last to know as little about it as a silkworm knows about the fineness of its thread.

—Walter Savage Landor, The Pentameron: and other imaginary conversations (1889)

what's in a name

If I could steal another poet’s name, I’d lift Walter Savage Landor. Just saying that name makes me feel like I'm about to write a major poem.

shape in space

A poem should have a physique, an armature; it should cut a figure.

intransigent matter

A poet intent on breaking down the most unpoetic material: To yield gold from the least promising ore, in that way the poet is not unlike the alchemist working with intransigent matter.

live free or die

Full-time poets live for free residencies: A long-term house sit or caretaker position, an artist colony invitation, all ideal. But even a squat in an abandoned building will do in a pinch.

selfish sin

The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation—and even a sin—in realm of art.

—Carl Gustav Jung, “The Poet”

verse tweezers

A couplet: verse tweezers used to present an image or a thought held in its squeeze of rhyme.

word museum

Already the poem was becoming a word museum.

no box for that

It seems a thing must first have a category before it can be criticized.

rogue editors

Breaking News [July 21, 2010]: Rogue poetry editors at The Paris Review accepted scads of hideously unpublishable poems. So much bad poetry was accepted that a replacement editor and turnaround specialist known as “Chainsaw Robyn” had to be called in to clean up the mess. One assistant editor at The Paris Review was reported to have said, “It’s just scandalous; I can’t find a single poem by one of my friends among these previously accepted submissions.”

by rights justify

A prose poem justifies itself by resorting to the right margin.

hot hand

A good poem is perhaps just a winning streak of lines.

image of note

                  Then is blown,
Cooling the air with shaded petal-waves,
The great sound-blossom of a temple bell.

—Mary McNeil Fenollosa (1865-1954), “Midsummer in Tokio," Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses (Little, Brown, 1899)

flip turn

Constraint of the verse line: With each flip-turn, a swimmer gains power pushing off from the pool wall.

hand built

Quote found today at the Ken Matsuzaki exhibit at Pucker Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston:

I spent twenty years throwing on the wheel, but eventually I left it to hand-build, one-by-one, the forms I had in my heart. I began to think that it was important to first know what I wanted to make and only then worry about developing the techniques by which to achieve it.

—Ken Matsuzaki, Burning Tradition: Ceramics by Ken Matsuzaki, exhibit catalogue Pucker Gallery in Boston, June 2008, translated by Andrew L. Maske

more than nine

Poetry has been killed so many times it has passed cats for number of lives.

better not best

Her poetry wasn’t hard to like; but it was difficult to admire. [Thinking of Kay Ryan]

poetic leap

The poet must not cross an interval with a step when he can cross it with a leap.

—Joseph Joubert, Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts, trans. by Katharine Lyttelton, quoted in The World in a Phrase (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005) by James Geary

word farm

Poet, be a word farmer.

stylist on ice

A great stylist must have a substantive substrate. It’s not thin ice upon which she carves those elaborate figures, executes those flawless axels.

birds of a feather

An exultation of skylarks, a murder of crows, a workshop of poets…

floating window

The lyric is a floating window at large in the world, stopping here or there long enough to frame a scene, to allow a certain action to unfold within its constrained vista.

immovable attitude

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

—Anaïs Nin, August 22, 1936, Fire: From "A Journal of Love, " The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (Mariner Books, 1996)

new old poet laureate

When the famous poet got the call from the Library of Congress, he said something like, "You know I'm honored to be asked. But you also know I've gotten pretty much every prize and award that matters in my long career. You need to pick somebody a generation or two younger than me. Might I suggest these worthy poets______________."

Only a fantasy for how one could gracefully decline an honor one deserved but didn't need.

think again

I hear they’ve been ‘rethinking poetics’. I hope this isn’t going to be an annual event.

darwinian word

Emerson opined that words are ‘fossil poetry’. But the trick is to naturally select those Darwinian words which will manage to stay out of the fossil record.

te-hee to he-haw

His work provoked a wide range of emotion, from a slight smile to a full guffaw.

breakout book

A poet who believed one book would make all the difference.

backyard poetry

August 6, Saturday afternoon. A thunder storm in Brooklyn after days of heat and humidity. I lie on my bed enjoying it, noticing the rain running down the bark of the tree outside my window. Charles [Reznikoff] would have enjoyed that. Backyard poetry, he wrote a lot of it. Backyard but not sentimental: the trees, the bark, the oblong light in the darkness scrupulously observed. That is what the Objectivists had in common. (Though Charles once told me that all they had in common when they first met was the state of being unpublished and an admiration for the dos and don’ts that Ezra Pound was publishing in Poetry magazine.)

—Harvey Shapiro, “Remembering Charles Reznikoff,” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation, 1984) edited by Milton Hindus

crafted carelessness

One felt a crafted carelessness that made it difficult to surrender to those odd collocations of imagery and outright tonal collisions.

vuvuzelas

People may have a differing opinions about these simple instruments that turn a football stadium into a hive of sound, but there is hardly a word more fun to say than ‘vuvuzelas’, and hardly a better one-word poem during this time of the FIFA World Cup.

by net or gaff

You’re gonna need a net or gaff to land that last line.

always fashion fails

It took only a decade for ‘impure forms’ to begin to bore.

attack syntax

A syntax that will not impede the speed of thought.

center will not hold

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, "On Painting," The Cubist Painters (1913)

all for one

Let’s all be avant-garde together.

broken wing

Each line flopped over like a broken wing, as the poem kept trying to fly.

mental matter

To a conceptualist it’s not about the act/art; it’s about the thinking about the act/art.

blurb substitute

Instead of blurbs, print this on the back of the book: “What are you looking for back here? Embarrassingly extravagant endorsements, conviviality, cronyism? Crack open the book and read a couple poems.”

no return point

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

—Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (Schocken Books, 2006), translated by Michael Hofmann