perpetually present

If the art of concentrating in a particular way is the discipline necessary for poetry to reveal itself, memory exercised in a particular way is the natural gift of poetic genius. The poet, above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense-impressions which he has experienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with all their original freshness.
[…]
A memory once clearly stated ceases to be a memory, it becomes perpetually present, because every time we experience something which recalls it, the clear and lucid original experience imposes its formal beauty on the new experiences. It is thus no longer memory but an experience lived through again and again.

—Stephen Spender, The Making Of A Poem (W.W. Norton & Co., 1962)

napoleon of your lines

Poet, be a field marshal who will not let his lines be outflanked.

upper case, higher place

The poem’s title was a hieratic headline.

no advancing back

The avant-gardist tries to piece together a lineage/heritage; but one thinks that the forebears he has cited would deny any heirs just as they'd denied ancestors.

quick and dirty crit

His criticism was a slapdash midrash.

modest and secret complexity

The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologue,” The Self and The Other (1964)

catch the prevailing wind

His poems are raised sails that never fail to catch the Zeitgeist. [Thinking of Billy Collins.]

in both mode and mood

A poem in a minor key.

alien arts allied

The best poems make use of the arts of bricklaying and flower arrangement.

money of fools

For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

just that one

The canon proves that one’s renown can be made by one poem.

nothing new here

He put down his pen and folded his hands because he wasn’t bringing anything ‘new to the tablet’.

if need be

Craft is art inflected by function.

voice overlord

They called her ‘confessional’ in order to silence her. [Thinking of Plath.]

no work of art at all

I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their home, and constantly trying to imitate them; so that I learnt to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone. I learnt what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy.

—R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford Univ. Press, 1958)

magic in creation

Revision is difficult because all the magic is there in the first draft.

making do

Translation is as necessary as it is impossible.

not much there

For good or for bad, poets keep proving you can write a poem about almost nothing at all.

in situ

Poems come from place.

imperfect paradise

"The imperfect is our paradise."

—Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of Our Climate"

--
Joan Richardson delivered an excellent talk last night for 15th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash entitled "Wallace Stevens' Radiant and Productive Atmosphere." A tracing of how the poet came to translate faith into his "supreme fiction.

The talk was based on an essay in Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein.

akin to poetry

Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Macmillan, 1938)

perfect to a point

A kind of craft that respects the means of imperfection.

relative scale

Each poet but a small part of the art.

known quantity

“You have a gift for irony,” I said to the young poet; then added, “I know whereof I speak.”

brick shithouse

A rock-solid block of words.

poem wins again

poem v. email; poem v. grocery list; poem v. recipe; poem v. washing instructions tab; poem v. job application; poem v. annual report; poem v. diner menu; poem v. text message; poem v. shooting script; poem vs. ingredients label; poem v. new great american novel; poem v. highway sign; poem v. last will & testament; poem v. prayer; poem v. headstone...

do you want to do

Actually, what I am consuming so happily is an absence: a paradox anything but paradoxical, if we remember that Mallarmé made it the very principle of poetry: “I say: a flower and…musically there rises the fragrant idea itself, the one missing from all bouquets.”

The fifth subject is the subject of production: the one who wants to re-produce the canvas. Thus this morning, December 31, 1978, it is still dark, it is raining, everything is still when I sit down at my worktable again. I look at Hérodiade (1960), and I really have nothing to say about it, except the same platitude: I like it. But suddenly something new appears, a desire: the desire to do the same thing: to go to another table (not the one where I write), to choose colors and to paint, to draw. Ultimately the question of painting is: “Do you want to do a Twombly?”

—Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms (U. of California Press, 1991), translated by Richard Howard

otherwise unavailable

One never to be seen at another poet’s reading.

ore words

Like Mallarmé he mistakenly thought poems were mined from the dictionary.

blurb exuberance

"On the nose, this explodes with intense aromas of freshly sliced granadilla joined by notes of lemon curd. Hints of geranium and just mowed lawn, with suggestions of asparagus braised with tarragon, rise from the glass to add intrigue and complexity to the top notes."

Aren’t most blurbs like the descriptions of wine?

strong contrast

A bauble image. A burned retina image.

sacred disorder

The worn-out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part in my alchemy of the word.

I got used to elementary hallucination: I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries; a vaudeville's title filled me with awe.

And so I explained my magical sophistries by turning words into visions!

At last, I began to consider my mind's disorder a sacred thing.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Alchemy of the Word,” Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), translated by Paul Schmidt (Harper & Row, 1976)

short shelf life

A poem full of fad words, some already starting to fade.

dream stream

Poetry: the dream that reality can’t break.

let's get lost

Poets are a little too liable to let their poems get lost.

book byways

I trust that in my haphazard scholarship I’ll be reading books others are not.

two originals

Every poem that works as a poem is original. And original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in the poetry alone, the two senses are united in such a way that they are no longer contradictory.

—John Berger, The Sense of Sight (Vintage International, 1985)

memory poems

I know a few poems by heart. And I feel a few in my gut.

words gone astray

A poetry that threatened the language with the prospect of a new dialect.

emergent poems

Blaahn…blaahn…blaahn…This has been a test of the Emergency Poetry Broadcast Network. Had this had been a real disaster poetry would begin broadcasting constantly from this station.

having words

Poetry is in a running argument with the lingua franca.

metaphor making truth

The pure adventurousness of making metaphors and poems is a condition that must be felt to be believed. I remember how tremendously excited I was when I first formulated to myself the proposition that the poet is not to be limited by the literal truth: that he is not trying to tell the truth: he is trying to make it.

—James Dickey, “Metaphor as Pure Adventure,” Sorties (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971)

know the worth of each word

A poet is a language miser. That is, he spends each word carefully, thoughtfully.

make something of yourself

Why do so many poets interpret the charge ‘Write what you know’ as ‘Tell me your life story’? ‘Writing’ is not telling. And to ‘know’ involves more than one’s experience.

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)