block poem

The poem was a block of words and where it was placed it stood firm.

reader's perogative

When one reads a lot it should not be a surprise, or even a source of consternation, when one’s words happen to echo those of others. A reader doesn't worry when his own words go so far as to paraphrase or to inadvertently plagiarize the words of other writers.

kept his plates fair

We Followers saw things from Whistler’s standpoint. If he etched a plate, we had to etch it almost exactly on Whistlerian lines. If Whistler kept his plates fair, ours were so fair that they could scarcely be seen. If Whistler adopted economy of means using the fewest possible lines, we became so nervous that we could scarcely touch the plate lest we should overelaborate.

—Mortimer Menpes, Whistler As I Knew Him (Hol Arts Book, 2009)

for the very first time

As the conceptualist explained the various ideas behind his project, we nodded and pretended to be discovering these notions for the first time.

the power to cow

The function of a blurb is to so overpraise the book that any reader would feel ashamed at being underwhelmed upon reading the book.

ambit and order

Romantic in scope, classical in construction.

night entries

Was it a good or bad thing that writing in his journal helped him fall asleep?

resonant space

I have chosen the second path, the path of encounter between inner and outer. What is important in this kind of art is to limit the parts of the work I make, accept the parts I do not make, and create a dynamic relationship in which these aspects both interpenetrate and repel each other. I hope that this relationship will lead to the opening up of a poetic, critical, and transcendent space.

I call this art yohaku—emptiness (resonant space).

What I mean by yohaku is not simply the space that is left vacant in the paintings of many painters. Such a space is lacking in reality. For example, if a drum is struck, the sound reverberates into empty space. The space of this vibration, including the drum, is what I call yohaku.

—Lee Ufan, “Yohaku—Emptiness,” The Art of Encounter (Lisson Gallery, 2004)

[Marking Infinity exhibit at the Guggenheim.]

bear pit

The workshop group was trying to tame the poem when they should have been provoking it with sharp sticks.

carriage return

If you were born before about 1965, and you were a young writer, then your typewriter probably holds a similar status to that of your first girl/boyfriend.

dither and drone

The poem’s fragments buzzed around my head like flies. I never felt I would be harmed by them or that I could catch them and hold them, but I had the urge to swat them down just to make them stop their incessant dither and drone.

wrong message

Bad backdrop for a poetry reader: A door with a red glowing EXIT sign over it.

not passing through

But the poet does not write chiefly for his own generation; he must therefore write about permanent things, or things that are permanent because they are perpetually renewed, like grass and humanity. The most important part of a poem is the subject; and permanence is the one essential element in the subject of poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, fragment "Preface" to Continent's End

don't look back

Not a good sign that line by line I felt the words vanishing behind me.

more is more

I'm against opulent poetry just as I'm against opulent houses.

safe for now

In my notebook, I established a ‘rescue pound’ for abused and neglected words.

making magic

All the magic in the making.

hard looks

What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford U. Press, 1959, p. 204) edited by H. House and G. Storey

seemed close enough to touch

The critics were small cold and stony satellites perpetually orbiting that great green and blue planet that was the poet.

publicide

The poem seemed to have some life while it was passed around in typescript, while under consideration, and as yet subject to revision. But once the poem was published that was the last seen of it.

can't stop this

A poet too bad to ever be blocked.

conjoined

The rhymes were too close: Like Siamese twins, sometimes one must suffer for the vitality of the other.

their language

They are speaking to one another. Whether you know
Their language or not is immaterial. They know yours.

Poof poof poof!
Sorrow dissolves in the chicken fat of daylight, the horns
Of taxicabs, a fat, old patzer standing at the street corner puffing
On a stogie, a poet clairvoyant with passion thrusting a piece
Of paper into a friend’s hand. Read this read this read this!

—Baron Wormser, “For the Yiddish Poets,” Scattered Chapters: New & Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2008)

careless with words

Are you too careless with language to be poet? Then again, that may be why you are a poet.

worse than being heckled

Oscar Wilde quipped that ‘a poet can survive anything but a misprint’. A corollary could be that a poetry reader can survive anything other than a noisy espresso machine.

e-phemera

How is it this online magazine ceased publication before I knew it existed?

literary milling

Whether it was a press or book mill, I couldn’t tell.

marble statue

Each of these new poems stands and prevails as a marble statue, a pure form in itself, delineated on all sides and locked into its own permanent contours, as the soul is locked into its mortal body. These poems—I shall only refer to the “Panther” and the “Carousel”—are carved out of the clumsy cold stone of their daylight brightness, like clear cameos, transparent only to the eye of the mind—structures of piercing hardness unknown heretofore in the German Lyric, the victory of knowing objectivity over the mere idea, the triumph, the ultimate triumph of language turned into total plasticity. Every single object stands there in its own immovable gravity...

—Stefan Zweig, Farewell to Rilke (Friends of the Daniel Reed Library, State University College, Fredonia NY, 1975), translated by Marion Sonnenfeld.

[Rainer Maria Rilke fans should scare up a copy of this pamphlet. It’s hagiography but of the highest form. Stefan Zweig is a beautiful prose stylist, and this was his memorial oration for Rilke delivered in Munich in 1927.]

grand manner

If you are going to get grandiose be expansive to the point of comic exaggeration or else be extravagant in the generosity of your vision.

sane over strange

I favor a poetry that proves itself sane over the poetry that is patently strange.

not literature per se

What Blake was writing was his universe.

missing matter

A poem that seems to have three times as many words than it has.

carpet paradigm

We can see the farthest development of Glasgow painting in the work of Edward Hornel, George Henry and David Gauld around 1889-90…In these canvases a fine line was trodden between decoration and narrative, and between a deep pictorial space and the shallow colour field. As one German critic noted, these works ‘approach the border where painting ends and the Persian carpet begins.

[….] we are concerned with a greater degree of abstraction and with the growing autonomy of pictorial elements and decorative motifs. This principle of convergence has been called the ‘carpet paradigm’. By the mid-1880s, for a painting to be likened to a carpet or tapestry was, in Post-Impressionist circles, a singular point of praise.

—David Brett, C. R. Mackintosh, The Poetics of Workmanship (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992)

belief system

For a poet language is creed.

sleep derived

You call it a dream poem, but aren’t they all?

one's time as poet

Perhaps one is a poet only for that brief duration when the new poem is read aloud.

before color

He was a visionary in black & white, sometimes sepia.

poet before philosopher

Here Coleridge encounters, in thoroughly existential fashion, anxiety itself. He cannot pin down this anxiety, cannot attach it to any definite object, event, or person; it is the revelation of void or non-being:

  A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
    A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
    Which find no natural outlet, no relief,
      In words, or sight, or tear—

All the German idealism, with which poor Coleridge’s head was crammed had nothing to say to him about this experience; it did not even provide the terms necessary for its philosophic comprehension. Kierkegaard had no yet introduced the analysis of dread into philosophy. Coleridge the poet, however, saw and knew before Coleridge the philosopher.

—William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study of Existential Philosophy (Anchor Books/Random House, 1962)

poet's statement

A convention of art exhibits is for the artist to write an ‘artist’s statement’ to accompany the work being shown. Often the document is only a couple paragraphs in length and it explains (or tries to explain) the artist’s motives and thought process behind the work being presented. Given that artists, visual by nature, must struggle to produce even these short tracts, I think that poets would be well served if they composed similar documents to be included with each new book of poems.

shaker poem

Spare in design, elemental in material, and elegant in its function: a Shaker poem.

sonic mechanics

The gears of rhythm driving the chain of thought.

tabula rasa reader

If you're averse to a particular kind of poetry, set aside your aesthetic predilections, if you are in sympathy with a particular kind of poetry, set aside your artistic competitiveness, and read the work on its own terms, with due care and attention.

revolution of dreams

Because the mechanistic imagery I had used so far had begun to horrify me, and certainly contradicted in intent and almost in coloration what I wanted to do next, it suggests that a new imagery must be found, less like a crustacean’s shell. But to change one’s images is like trying to revolutionize one’s dreams. It can’t be done overnight. Nor can it be effected by will. I find one entry reading: “Something seems to have been broken in me last year, like a spring breaking…What broke…is perhaps the sense that you can build your life by choice. Now I think you build it out of necessities—and that is all you can do is answer these necessities in the decentest way possible…I am trying to learn to lead a decent life and not want to be a great person and, at the same time, know what I have the human right to draw the line at.”

—Jane Cooper, “Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread,” essay in The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (Norton, 2000)

go then

If it’s too difficult for you, don’t bother reading poetry. It’s not like we’ll miss a little less audience.

accidental poem

The titles on the contents page formed a poem that could be read with interest.

breaker of words

Poet, be a cowboy in the rodeo of words. Ride them but let their wildness show.

broken beauty

A test for beauty: Could it be beautiful broken into pieces…or fallen into a state of ruin?

balance of terror

A poem rests, barely, on a single line
a kind of balance of terror
humans must hold out their arms
and endure this balance—
a moment’s dizziness
will tilt your whole life

—Tamura Ryuichi, the opening stanza of “Perhaps a Great Poem,” Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, edited by Takako Lento & Wayne Miller (Pleiades Press, 2011)

trick of the trade

Set out only a few chairs for the poetry reading. This will condense the audience into a tight cluster, and if more chairs must be set up before the start of the reading, it will feel like an overflow event.

until the name alone would suffice

The length of a poet’s bio is in inverse relationship to the size of her/his reputation.

exit solo

Sad as it is to say, a great poet of love is dying alone. [Berkeley, CA]

empty cage

The poem was a finely constructed cage, but the door was unclasped and the bird within had flown.

spaces between

What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.

—Max Frisch

(Quote encountered in Marco Breuer's Line of Sight installation at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.)

standing room only

Even though they are comfortably seated, one should read to his/her audience as though they were being forced to stand for the entire proceeding.

allegience at large

The poem as a flag for no nation.

supply-side economics

Often it seems we are producing more & more poetry books (in print & digital media) yet we’re failing to increase readership for this mass of material.

from poetry expect poetry

How little divides us finally from Longinus and his classic work on the sublime, written in the early years of our era. The literary encyclopedia reminds us that the sublime is not a formal feature of a work and can’t be defined by way of rhetorical categories. It is instead “a spark that leaps from the soul of the writer to the soul of the reader.” Has so much really changed? Don’t we still wait greedily for that spark?

Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes. These worthy qualities and forms perform splendidly in their proper place—in an essay, a scholarly tract, a broadside in an opposition newspaper. In poetry, though, we seek the vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry.

—Adam Zagajewski, title essay, A Defense of Ardor (FSG, 2002), translated by Clare Cavanaugh

palace or cell

Being locked inside one language, I’m glad that English is a sprawling palace, its rooms furnished with things collected from many nations, and not a small prison cell, spare and well-swept.

framed for attention

Art begins by framing for attention. The framing can be physical of course, as in the traditional picture frame or mural, or in sculpture the negative space around the object provides a frame, or the art may be framed in the sense of being captured on film/video, or it may be framed by the venue in which it takes place as in installation art or performance art, even landscape/cityscape art is framed for presentation to a random passer-by. Art that is framed asks for and awaits our attention, which is to say it seeks audience, however small or insular, and ultimately art, thus framed, seeks appreciation. And it is appreciation, by even a small group, that closes the circle and makes art of what was proffered by the framing.

as in chess

Will the first line be a quiet opening or a gambit?

landmarks in passing

A critic who was like a literary tour guide; a bit too glib when more glamour was called for.

no inert fact

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne (The Free Press, 1978, p. 310), lecture delivered in 1927.

rhetorical question

Why not write about the rhombus?

for want of form

When the words came pouring out of him, for want of form, he grasped for cups, buckets & pans.

dead poet pinned down

It won’t be long before the annotated Bukowski is released.

another monsterpiece

Too many who haven’t the content or the temperament for the task, think to be a major poet means they must write a poem of epic length.

with nothing to bring

if representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.

—Clive Bell, Art (Oxford U. Press, 1987, p. 25)

[Of course, one might ask, "What choice have we? It's not as though we can set aside all prior experience before we address a work of art."]

unexpected delight

When reading a book in a field far removed from poetry, I often begin by flipping to the index to see if there are any references to the word ‘poet’ or ‘poetry’. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised.

the x-ray and the acetylene torch

Criticism is analytic; while theory is synthetic.

waste land the sequel

“The Waste Land 2” was not quite as compelling. It borrowed some of the glory but lacked the energy of the original.

[See iPad app]

This just in: Many who downloaded the app complained to Apple when they realized "The Waste Land" was not a video game in which zombies and alien lifeforms could be blasted into colorful pixels.

translation machine

Always the same handful of poets are translated again & again: How many Rilkes, Lorcas, Rimbauds, etc., do we need?

[Thinking of Ashbery's recent Rimbaud]

outside in

Only when the outside is in us can it start to become material for the poem. But again, this is only a beginning, because the outside world enters everyone and not only into poets, and within each of us is that same labyrinth of paths, of which few are taken, often the same ones.

—Joan Margarit, New Letters to a Young Poet (Swan Isle Press, 2011), translated by Christopher Maurer

overmediated

A poem of many plies of mediation.

severed vitals

Lines cut from its middle, an act of harakiri for the poem, and it was like the whole body folded over and collapsed.

cat people

Poets living with house cats always invoking lions.