no things but in ideas

Mallarmé famously admonished Degas by saying that poems are not made of ideas, they are made of words. In turn the conceptualists have refuted Mallarmé by making poems out of ideas.

sign of the times

The young poet came up to the open mike holding nothing. At first I thought she must be a slam poet who had committed her work to memory. Then she took out her iphone/droid and she started reading from the device.

obedience not invention

Now I believe that much of the work on the poem called “Ghost Ship” amounted to obedience, not invention: obedience, that is, to the preexistent poetry of the ordinary word. To cure—to have a care for—poetry is to keep its elements, the words on the tongue, the symbols of our acts, alive—by suspicion, and attention.

—Mary Kinzie, "The Cure of Poetry," The Cure of Poetry in the Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling (U. of Chicago Press, 1993)

chin up

A first line so strong that one can feel the whole poem straining to get its chin up over the bar.

make your mark

After the reading, the poet was asked to sign a copy of his book, the remainder mark clearly visible along the edge of its pages.

lazy man's load

The line was trying to carry a ‘lazy man’s load’ of allusions.

ingredients label

I’m in favor a federal legislation mandating an Ingredients Label on the back of all poetry books in lieu of blurbs. The most frequently used words could be listed: ‘Moon: 13; Cow: 11; Grass: 8; Light: 6; all others 5 or less instances'. And each text would be analyzed for content: ‘Poeticisms: 14%; Imagery: 11%; Tropes: 7%; Internal Rhyme: 2.7% ; and other rhetorical or quasi-poetic matter and filler'.

closed to some

So many poems are shaped like doors; and some really are.

poetry in its own way

I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which a critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.

—George Saintsbury, “Eighteenth Century Poetry,” A Saintsbury Miscellany (Oxford U. Press, 1947)

valentine

Poetry books are made thin so you can slip one under your true love’s door.

never enough

Why are so many poets unhappy with poetry?

everything possible

Novices: new voices, no vices.

voices carry

The human voice will carry any poem a little farther than its text.

summons to the mountain

Let the canon come to me.

sacrilege change

[Charles] Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

my odd book club

Being a book reader and not a collector, I have never minded that readers before me have marked the pages. As long as they are not too demonstrative, to the point of occluding the text, with their underlinings, checkmarks and margin notes, then I’m happy to have shared a book with other minds, some still living and others long dead.

memory or imagination

Poetry torn/born between the urge to memorialize and the desire to imagine.

theory poets

Those theory people who have infiltrated poetry without the ability to feel.

more or less clearly

Robinson will not say anything in such a way as to make the responsibility for choice his own rather than the reader’s. He will simply render the situation and leave us to judge it, for all of Robinson’s poems presuppose an outside world of critics and judges, of ourselves, people who see and observe more or less clearly.

—Louis A. Coxe, “E. A. Robinson: The Lost Tradition,” Appreciation of E. A. Robinson (Colby College Press, 1969)

now what

You get credit for getting there first. But then one must find a way forward.

protective structure

A poem so obviously structured it was like receiving a gift still in its crate.

closed in upon

Was that a close reading or a closed reading of the poem?

different readers, alternate lines

Reading his commonplace book, I discovered we had read many of the same books, yet lines he had chosen to quote I’d passed over without notice.

substition of terms: two bricks, two words

Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.

—Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (New York Herald Tribune, 28 Jun 1959)

Poetry starts when you carefully put two words together. There it begins.

just nubs

The stunted lines.

inspired listening

One can entertain any beliefs one likes with regard to the sources of poetry, but whether it is God-given, daemonically inspired or willed by self, one has to be a poet before one can write poetry; if one is not a poet one merely entertains these beliefs and nothing more. Whether one deals with religious or poetic inspiration, with Grace or with any other manifestation of extraordinary power, ‘the spirit bloweth where it listeth’, and in order to hear, one must be capable of listening and of attention.

—Joseph Chiari, Realism and Imagination (Barrie & Rockliff. London. 1966)

this then and not that

A poet who unfailingly knew what to say and when to say it, and most of all what should be left unsaid.

kayak tongue

Let your kayak tongue drop into the rapids of speech.

buoyed on the great body

Is it that from the great ocean of the oeuvre a few canonical poems float to the top, or is it that a great body of work will buoy a few poems that we hold on to?

from on high

It wasn’t just inspiration, it was a download from heaven.

bring a heavy thing

poetry

i know

i can bring

every heavy thing

here


—Mairéad Byrne (originally posted to her blog Heaven on 6-1-2008)

blinds drawn

Ruled paper: That window with the blinds drawn.

unhurried hand

It was the kind of poem one felt had been written in pen, in longhand.

desciption's diminishing returns

With detail and description there is always the law of diminishing returns: At a certain point the language becomes an intricate, often beautiful, damask that occludes all beneath its surface.

we have a runner

Why are you writing like you’re running away from yourself?

inner and then more

All great poems...by the way they colonize and amplify and enhance the music of our own inner voices, of consciousness and conscience, ask us to be greater than we are, and if we read them well even show us how to begin.

—C. K. Williams, On Whitman (Princeton U. Press, 2010)

well layered language

A sonnet of fourteen-ply strength.

mindlocked

The poem you had in mind must often remain there.

not there at first glance

To shape the universal theme into a particular form (case) that one will not at first recognize, but will come to realize upon reflection.

pastoral not paradisal

The kind of pastoral poetry in which one might come upon some shotgun shells lying in the grass.

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.