wherever the end

The last lines of almost any poem, because they are the ending, will by default seem a grand summing up or a reaching for epiphany. Had the last few lines been anywhere else in the poem they’d be seen as much less portentous.

fragile construct

Too fragile for its flaws, perhaps you were wise not to revise the piece.

snowfield

Block: The page a snowfield, deep and unmarked to the far edge.

not a hill or a tree

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most the definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, 1977


[Quote encountered today at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM.]

finish it

The poem that wouldn’t give up on me.

first marks

No line is harder to write than the first line in a new notebook.

ko'd

Think of the crumpled poem as the creator’s fist going down swinging.

petting zoo

It was the kind of workshop that is more of a petting zoo for new poems.

step-ladders and demon-traps

Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at the true purposes seized only at the last moment—at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions—the tackle for scene-setting—the step-ladders, and demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of literary histrio.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846, 19th Century American Writers on Writing (Trinity U. Press, 2010) , edited by Brenda Wineapple

stand clear

Sometimes the content is so inherently poetic that all the poet must do is to keep the language from getting in the way of the telling.

no room for pseudonym

Put your name on a poem: The poem is your name.

ka-boom

Poet, detonate denotation!

house to house

Two weeks before Christmas, a group of poets went out ‘caroling’ their poems. Some doors were slammed, but many homes welcomed them.

come who may

An accidental audience is all the poet can hope for.

sharp rebound

Complex and subtle interests, which the mind spins for itself may occupy art and poetry or our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come back with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions—anger, desire, regret, pity, and fear; and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world—bare, abstract, fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has called the ‘glory of motion’. [99]

—Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

skyline features

A few poems in the book stood like skyscrapers against other low-rise structures.

through or over

As a medium or as the messenger are two ways the poet can carry out her/his social mission.

aphoristic aphrodisiac

The villanelle: a form made to order for the aphorist.

hop along

The meter felt a little off kilter; it was a line with a limp.

off the rails

When a poem is going too fast and is about to come off the rails (the line), let it.

writing jail

Joan Simon: …What’s ahead?

Jenny Holzer: Trying to write something again. I haven’t locked myself up recently. As soon as I finish the next round of public pieces—in Europe and the US—I have to go to writing jail.

Joan Simon: The artists that have fed into your thinking are an extremely diverse lot. Among the earliest is writer, artist and printer William Blake.

Jenny Holzer: When I read Songs of Innocence (1779-c. 1800), for the first time I was entirely convinced that there was good in the world, including people.

Joan Simon: And his illustrations?

Jenny Holzer: I liked the fact that Blake was able to have the text and images inhabit the same space.

Joan Simon: Was there any one poem in particular?

Jenny Holzer: There is a lamb poem with just one little sinister turn that mentions a neck.

Joan Simon: ‘Little Lamb / Here I am, / Come and lick, / My white neck.’

Jenny Holzer: That’s the one. Then from Songs of Experience:

     If thought is life
     And strength and breath
     And the want
     Of thought is death.

“Jenny Holzer and Joan Simon in Conversation, June 1997, New York”
pressPlay: contemporary artists in conversation (Phaidon Press, 2005)

good in a room

The sonnet is the right form for frustrated interior decorators.

nothing but now

In a poem the temporal collapses into the universal now.

if you build it

How to build an anthology truly representative of a century of poets/poetry:
  A. Pick your poets first; then select their best and most representative poems.
  B. Ordered by increasing level of difficulty, identify and select:
    1) Primary: Important figures of enduring reputation and influence. Generally speaking, they are already well-represented in other anthologies or critical histories of the century.
    2) Secondary: Though their reputations and influence may have waned considerably over the years, figures who were important during a period of time. They set off a trend / fashion that during a certain time (generally at least a decade) garnered much attention and critical interest.
    3) Comprehensive: (related to #2) Figures who are representative of a school/movement¸ however fleeting was its influence, which is important to filling out the entire picture of the century’s poetry.
    4) Corrective: Figures whose inclusion will help to correct a bias caused by a general lack of publishing opportunities and attention, resulting primarily from ignorance or neglect by the dominant cultural and critical powers.

Footnote: Don't be cheap and beg if you have to, but don't omit someone important (Ginsberg/Plath) due to steep reprint fees. Solicit donations from major organizations like The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, etc. You only have one chance to get it right.

dangerous business

Poet, be a sapper of the psyche.

fall left or right

Language is alive. For the poet, each word represents sounds and meaning; the music of meaning is shaped by words that fall left or right of a single word. Each word is an increment of the whole. Perhaps we are drawn to poetry because the language vibrates (is an action), and we seem to search still for a language that will keep us whole.

—Yusef Komunyakaa, “Kit & Caboodle,” The Eye of the Poet (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

slowly closing in

Each translation by virtue of its errors makes the next translation closer to right.

twist of phrase

And a very taxing syntax it was.

bad advice

The poet must avoid the kind of writing guidance that leads to composing competent prose.

otherwordly

Metaphor is the metaphysics of words.

good tailor

Like a good tailor who fashions a suit that fits one man (or even two) resplendently; and an overcoat that might suit two or three—thus for me might my poems be made ‘to fit’, in one case (or perhaps in two or three). This comparison is somewhat deprecatory (only in a superficial sense); but it is, I think, accurate and reassuring. If my poems do not fit in a general sense, then they fit in a particular sense. This is no small matter. Their truth is, in this fashion, guaranteed.

—C.P. Cavafy, Selected Prose Works (U. of Michigan Press, 2010), translated by Peter Jeffreys

means more

Meaning doesn’t wear out, it deepens and becomes more nuanced.

not known as poetry

It’s promising when at first a piece of writing is not recognized as being poetry.

not horizon but waterfall

The notion of ‘line’ in Chinese, Korean and Japanese poetry can’t be scanning a horizon, rather it must be watching a waterfall.

words at play

The poem was a sound playground.

leaning late

Last night was the 16th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash featuring Robert Pinsky reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

"The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm" was one of the poems Pinsky chose to discuss at length. Here are a few lines:

    The words were spoken as if there was no book,
    Except that the reader leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

follows no wave

The poem is oblivious to fashion.

skips a generation

In the era of word processing software, the poet faced with a protracted power outage reverts to longhand as though the machine age, represented by the typewriter, never happened.

(n.b.: on the fifth night without power.)

removed from spoken language

The value of the language of poetry is directly proportional to its being removed from the spoken language. This is what common people cannot understand, since they do not want to accept the fact that a poet endeavors to express only the unutterable.

—Vicente Huidobro, “Poetry,” lecture delivered at El Ateneo de Madrid, 1921, The Poet is a Little God (Xenos Books, 1990), translated by Jorge García Gόmez.

the breaks

A linebreak as a means to semantic attention or syntactic surprise.

written tune

The poem being all music and no gist, made me wonder whether it would have been better whistled rather than written.

inadvertent advert

So often listed in poets' bios, more poets knew the name of the literary magazine than ever read the magazine itself.

frail reasoning

Much of the poetics one hears about ‘the line’ amounts to grasping at straw.

color drained from them

Words go wan before experience.

walk and talk

I was from German and Scandinavian working farmer/logger/fisherman world of pre-WWII Puget Sound, Allen from the New York City Immigrant Left. We met in a backyard in Berkeley, and again in Kenneth Rexroth's wood-floored apartment in the foggy Avenues zone of San Francisco...We argued a lot and were not easy on each other. I made him walk more, and he made me talk more. It was good for both of us.

—Gary Snyder, introduction to The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder (Counterpoint, 2008)

stay with it

To reveal the mystery within the real without resorting to metaphor.

greasy and slick

Slathered with unctuous blurbs, the book felt uncomfortably sticky to the touch.

stress no less

When you say this is ‘blank verse’, are you talking only about the poem’s meter?

could hear it coming

You could drop that noisy last line like a bad muffler.

no feet

HUIDOBRO WAS LIKE THAT

Don’t ask me to write with my feet
He replied
When they accused him of being too intellectual

—Nicanor Parra, “XXIX,” After-Dinner Declarations (Host Publications, 2008), translated by Dave Oliphant

dangerous crossing

The poem could only cross this line at its own peril.

craft's limit

Where and when the resources of craft run out, art must sustain.

no family resemblance

Everywhere critics keep finding heirs to the childless Whitman and Dickinson.

rogue prose

The poem as reprobate prose.

flickering effects

Like Constable, Tomlinson admires accidents because they are governed by laws, however difficult to fathom (just as his poetry careens between seeming laxness and the occasional inevitability of rhyme and meter); he most values the peculiar combination of revelation and concealment brought about by changes of light in a landscape. The pleasure of seeing and then rendering, whether in paint or in language, the unstable, flickering effects in an external scene “discovers” (his word) one’s true identity, allowing the artist to become himself only during the moments when he is actively engaged in reproducing his passive observations. What we see uncovers what we are; what we are defines what we discover. By using as an epigraph to his poem Constable’s own inquiry into the relation between science and painting (“May not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”), Tomlinson implicitly asks whether landscape poems might not constitute equivalent experiments.

—Willard Spiegelman, “Just Looking: Charles Tomlinson and the ‘Labour of Observation’,” How Poets See The World: The art of description in contemporary poetry (Oxford U. Press, 2005)

mind museum

Looking at paintings/photographs helps one fill a mind museum of fine images.

follows the money

After his death, the poet’s reputation slipped in proportion to the fewer pages in major anthologies carrying his work, which in turn was a result of the hefty fees his rights holders asked for permission to reprint his poems.

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