simple place

His hermitage…looked much the same as Merton left it, we were told. The back room held a narrow bed and a small stack of books, with three cassocks hanging in an alcove. The kitchen, which is only a wide place in the hall, held a sink, hot-plate, small refrigerator, and the only framed item in the place—a certificate from the Vatican conferring upon him the designation “Hermit.” His front room held the writing table, bookcase, rocking chair, and those large unadorned windows with the generous view of the woods and the cart-path meandering into the distance.

—Frederick Smock, Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton (Broadstone Books, 2007), p. 27

wave line

The poetic line lifts, rolls and crashes upon reason’s rocks.

reading with your lips moving

A poem that entered your mind through the eyes, yet instantly caused you to mouth the words.

night of the red pens

For godsake, don’t ever let your poetry workshop devolve into a coven of copy editors.

no hope for poetry now

My poetry impeded by the happiness and hope which pervades my spirit.

no fifth leg

Emerson loved language as much as any poet does, but he understood that reality is larger than language. If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have? The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one. “All language,” says Emerson in “The Poet,” “is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as horses and ferries are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Emerson did care for language—a great deal—but he always insisted that words do not exist as things in themselves, but stand for things which are finally more real than the words.

—Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (U. of Iowa Press, 2009)

reader subverts author

The poet spends an inordinate time arranging and ordering the poems in the collection, and then I just crack it open and start reading here & there.

drawn near

A metaphor implied solely by textual proximity.

happenstance

An accidental occasional poem.

poet's song

Folk singers: poets who can play the guitar.

no word for that

[Valéry’s] horror of philosophic jargon is so convincing, so contagious, that one shares it forever after, so that one can no longer read a serious philosopher except with suspicion or distaste, henceforth rejecting any falsely mysterious or learned term. Most philosophy boils down to a crime of lèse-langage, a crime against the Word. Any professional expression—any profession of the schools—must be proscribed and identified with a misdemeanor. Anyone who, in order to settle a difficulty or solve a problem, invents a high-sounding, pretentious word, indeed a word at all, is unconsciously dishonest. In a letter to F. Brunot, Valéry once wrote, “It takes more intelligence to do without a word than to introduce one.”

—E.M. Cioran,“Valéry Facing His Idols,” Anathemas and Admirations (Quartet Books, Ltd, 1992), translated by Richard Howard.

words overflowing

The poem as a waterfall of words.

a lot on top

The title was a little over the top…but that's where it should reside.

unseasonal verse

It's a good idea to write a poem about the first of May in November or December, when you feel a desperate need for May.

—Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (1926)

selling short

The poor poet kept trying to sell out.

poets inside and out

The monastic poet half-dreaming at his desk in the attic stirred by the street poet declaiming from the stoop to passersby.

language control

To control loosely or to too loosely control or to lose control?

driving force

The repeated phrases gave the poem the hum of a good engine.

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.