write it, live it

You give up too easily on literature’s power to alter lives.

fear of falling

With white knuckles the letters of the poem clung to the page, fearing they’d be knocked off the anthology page at any moment.

not lost in spectacle

…it’s notable that the making of and participation in poetry is so independent of high technology. A good sound system at a reading is of course a great advantage. Poetry readings can now be heard on tape, radio, recorded on video. But poetry would get lost in an immense technological performance scene. What poetry can give has to be given through language and voice, not through effects of lighting, sound, superimposed film images, nor as mere adjunct to spectacle.

—Adrienne Rich, “Someone is Writing a Poem,” What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (W.W. Norton, 1993)

war never over

Every so often a seemingly sensible person will try to raise again that tired argument that ‘free verse is not poetry’ because free verse lacks regular meter and/or rime. These people are like those few Japanese soldiers who were left stranded for years on remote Pacific islands, unaware that many years before Japan had surrendered, they were still prepared to fight, ready emerge from their dugouts and caves in the jungle to wage a war that was long over.

[See description of holdouts.]

poverty without poetry

When I think of all ways in which chance led me to poetry, and I think of how easily I may have missed this art, no matter my occasional frustrations and even exasperations with my own writing, I know my life would be so much poorer without poetry, and I’m thankful down to my core for poetry.

going low

Reading bad poetry helps you understand all of what it takes to make one good poem.

vital organs

Certain words pulse like organs in the poem’s body.

work song

As one labors through revision one listens for the echo of the original inspiration.

that stance

Too personal, too political, too plain…I loved—and love—his [Etheridge Knight’s] work because of the overwhelming passion, the variety of form, and the exact appropriateness of the language. I almost didn’t realize the nervousness, the “calm hysteria” of the poems, their unity of voice, and their overwhelming political stance. It’s almost as if the poet—and his poems—were so grounded, so authentic, that I took that stance for granted. Thus spoke Etheridge; thus was Etheridge. I almost took for granted the magnificent art.

—Gerald Stern, “Etheridge Knight,” Stealing History (Trinity Univ. Press, 2012)

uncommon readers

Most of the avant-garde’s audience consists of mainstream poets. Because they're the only ones who can meet the work at least halfway.

shipping lines

The good ship poem sailed on.

not open for business

The first line was like one of those ne’er-do-wells loitering mid-morning in front of the liquor store waiting for the doors to open.

jack gilbert

They Will Put My Body Into the Ground

They will put my body into the ground.
Chemistry will have its way for a time,
and then large beetles will come.
After that, the small beetles. Then
the disassembling. After that, the Puccini
will dwindle the way light goes
from the sea. Even Pittsburgh will
vanish, leaving a greed tough as winter.


—Jack Gilbert, Monolithos: Poems 1962 and 1982

[My friend Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) passed away this morning in Berkeley CA.]

silent witness

Is my reticence regarding certain subjects equivalent to a resistance to the truth?

oblique reference

No poet ever travelled in search of beauty. No poet ever looked at a scene and cried ‘Wonderful’. Memorable beauty comes at us obliquely while we are going about our troubled business.
[…]
The pursuit of beauty is one of the defects of the tourist’s point of view. The tourist is in a hurry; he demands quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious. But for all that, it is possible even when we pursue beauty or happiness to come upon oblique references to it. The job is to recognize them in the hurry.

—Patrick Kavanagh, title essay of A Poet’s Country (The Lilliput Press, 2003), edited by Antoinette Quinn

welding torch song

A poem welded together by word sounds.

cleaning house

The anthologist was guilty of aesthetic cleansing.

remember this

Regard those recurring memories. They are trying to tell you something.

poet in the sun

Last night was the Seventeenth Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Jay Parini delivered a vibrant and flowing talk taking us through about six of Stevens' poems, making a case for how Stevens uses a poetic 'code', with certain words representing maker/poet, reality, imagination. Parini traced how this poetic code was present in Stevens' poetry since the very beginning.

A poem Parini made note of was the concluding section of "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," in which these lines appear...

    Soldier, there is a war between the mind
    And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
    For that the poet is always in the sun,

    Patches the moon together in his room
    To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
    Up down. It is a war that never ends.

sewn into

Poet, write so that the words are stitched to the page.

wild in ordered manner

Stevie [Smith] probably did read too much for her own happiness, but for her poetry the result was a well of association sunk through centuries. She also read a great deal outside of English, particularly in French, and especially Racine, whose decorous example helped inspire the finely calibrated play of tone which permitted her to run wild in an ordered manner.

—Clive James, “Stevie Smith: Not Drowning but Waving,” As Of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002 (Norton, 2003)

unmoved

Too much of a stoic to be a poet.

play ball

Baseball seems to be the sport favored by poets, especially in San Francisco.

closely held

A poem of one's own: its only reader the one who composed it.

before one

Egoless he came to poetry.

broken pieces

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.

—Bruno Schulz's "Letters and Other Writings," Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait (Norton, 2002) by Jerzy Ficowski, translated by Theodosia Robertson.

See Art of Bruno Schulz.

gift or grit

When we admire an artist’s work, we weigh: What part gift, what part grit?

simple concept

The conceptual poem: Concept recognized. Next, please.

that ends it

The last line was a ‘walk off’ home run.

no know

And yet after my knowing "ah-ha,"
the poem retains
an everlasting je ne sais quoi.

and action

The poem enacts its prose script.

for a single word

The scene is a cliche
But the cliche is a reality

-

The desire to know
what it is that affects me

-

Ich warte immer nur
auf ein Wort
Wenn das wort gesagt ist
ist es mir schon genug

[I always wait
just for a single word
When the word has been said
that is good enough]

-

When the music and the
scratches are part of the
same thing

—Peter Schmidt, selections from The Thoughts Behind The Thoughts (Mindmade Books, 2012)

inexhaustible window

In the frame of any one window there are a million poems.

melted celluloid

When it comes to composing an image cinema is both resource and reliquary.

sales quotas

One way to cut back on the superfluous poetry books being published would be to make it a rule that you have to sell 75% of the print run before you can publish another title. For print-on-demand books, the rule would be you must sell 250 copies (not counting extended family) before you can perpetrate another title.

stumbled upon

The images of a haiku should seem stumbled upon, encountered by happenstance; never as composed or arranged as though a set design.

never sure of arrival

Today I still love, even foolishly, the signs and wonders, felt presences or nearnesses of meaning, where we must follow, in trust, having no more sure a guarantee of our arrival than does the adventurer in a fairy or hero tale.

—Robert Duncan, Fictive Certainties (New Directions, 1985) p. 46

down to the underword

Poet, sometimes you must go down to and return with the ‘underword’.

straight line

Aphorism: a verse that won’t be turned.

step it up

Poetry books are thin. But I’ve found that for certain poets they function as lifts. After publishing, the poet stands a little taller, the poet strides forth with more confidence.

curious result

Overly concerned with trying to innovate he created only a curiosity.

poetry doesn't need you

Poetry doesn’t need you to coax out its meanings or to tease out its
     strategies or to unpack its bags.

[…]

Poetry doesn’t need you to vibrate or widen your mindscope or
     suckle your cowsack or snuff up your hornblow or sweat out
     your insides or dredge up your backwash or kick in your
     facecloth or chisel your eyeteeth or sink into quicksand.

—Ken Cormier, two sections from “Poetry Doesn’t Need You,” The Tragedy in My Neighborhood (Dead Academics Press, 2011)

more perfect union

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States contains an expression that should be a guide to revision: “in order to form a more perfect union...”

the persauder

He could close the deal with one poem at an open mike.

moral motive

Writing a political poem is more of a moral obligation and less often a matter of choice.

lowering the canon

A common ploy of weak critics who are unable to prevail by the force of their arguments: They’ll close their essays by lowering a big gun from the canon, firing off the name of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton,…

praise haze

Why would one want to read the blurbs before the book? Like putting on colored glasses before entering the museum gallery. Like trying to hear the orchestra with the whine of air conditioning units on the hall’s roof.

carried far

The poet’s speech begins     a great way off.
The poet is     carried far away by speech

—Marina Tsvetayeva, opening of “The Poet,” Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (E.P. Dutton, 1989), translated by Elaine Feinstein

stepping in

Free verse put prose into prosody.

yuk yuk

A poet who wanted to entertain: After the reading you remembered that you laughed. But that was all you remembered.

shift happens

After reading a great poem, something like a Kuhnian ‘paradigm shift’ occurs within the mind. Once you have read the poem your thought patterns are forever altered, your psychic response to events is deflected in an entirely new direction. The page is turned utterly, irrecoverably, so to speak. You will never again be the person you were in the minutes, hours, days and years before you encountered that poem.

self-exiled

Plato would banish the poets from the ideal polis, but the worthy poets would have already exiled themselves, even if still living therein, from the mores and norms of that populace.

specific gravity

What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word’s specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk with an elevated state of mind.

[...]

[Marina Tsvetaeva] never has enough space: either in a poem or in prose. Even her most scholarly-sounding essays are always like elbows protruding from a small room. A poem is constructed on the principle of the complex sentence, prose consists of grammatical enjambments…

—Joseph Brodsky, “A Poet and Prose,” Less Than One: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986)

big thing in a small place

A big exuberant review in a small obscure journal.

difficult language

It may not be poetry’s difficulty that puts off some readers, rather it may be that most people don’t recognize poetry as an art because it uses only the simple means of language.

militant stanza

If a single stanza stands its ground, then perhaps the whole poem will hold the field.

ur-art

The wide application of the word ‘poetics’ to a variety of arts and across many human endeavors gives some credence to poetry’s claim on being the ur-art.

walls of sound

Poet, be a sound housebuilder.

poetry put on the spot

The poem [“We Are Seven”] also stages the transcription of voice that is poetry, lays it out in front of us so that we might count ourselves as implicated within its iteration. I think this is what Wordsworth wanted to achieve in the writing of poetry, and what led to his instruction to the poet in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that he descend from his supposed height and “express himself as other men express themselves.” It also suggests that the transcription of these words into poetry, or what might be called the work of figuration, in some strange way neuters the power of the figurative act; at least it sets up the uneasy thought that poetry may be unable to answer the need it speaks and shows. This is equivalent to the demand that poetry reveal or acknowledge its own power; to ask of poetry the source of that power given that the words from which it is made are nothing more than reflections, echoes, transcriptions.

—Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001, p. 116)

lockstep formalist

He was one of those formalists you could visualize dressed in a black uniform, a real GestaPo.

panlingual

Translation is possible because ‘poemness’, abstracted from the medium of a particular language, is a lingua franca that carries over and through race, nation, and time.

now what

The poem was a fine slideshow of images. But at the end it was as though someone couldn’t bring up the house lights, and as you sat there in the dark, you thought, “How appropriate.”

surprise poem

You pulled down the roller blind surprised to find a poem written on it.

figure / ground

Were there not a different aesthetic sensibility by which we could contrast our own, then how would we set our art apart? We can fight the background, but we shouldn’t wish it away. It is the necessary contrast, and we should respect it as such.

we recognize it

Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter’s success depends upon hitting his hearer’s intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it another way—at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universal Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never seem to condescend...
[…]
The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy, “it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, but so as we recognize it.

—Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pen name ‘Q’), “Poetry”

wayward words

A poet always ready to be led wayward by words.

wasting silence

I’ve heard it said that ‘architecture is the art of wasting space beautifully’. I don’t know who to attribute that remark to; though it may be a misquote of something Philip Johnson once said. In any case, it’s a wry remark and it makes me think that “Poetry is the art of wasting silence (or its material manifestation: the blank page) beautifully."

slog language

Long poem: a text of indeterminate length that will surely sorely try the most determined reader.

book that is a book

[I]t is inexact to speak of failure if we must qualify Mallarmé’s enterprise. A book that really would be a book: hidden beneath this seemingly tautological formula lies a true challenge, an outrageous demand, analogous with the infinite work or weaving, a demand that is always taken up again, which Proust took right into his death bed, “A book that really would be a book,” in one sense, is always impossible, for it would imply a “world that really would be a world,” a present that would be a present. The Book represents nothing other than that: “it is, the title of an interminable study and series of notes that I have here, under my hands, and which controls the deepest part of my soul,” as Mallarmé writes in a letter.

—Marc Froment-Meurice, Solitudes: from Rimbaud to Heidegger (State Univ. of New York Press, 1995) translated by Peter Walsh, foreword translated by Douglas Brick.

misdirection diction

When it came to reading the poem, the epigraph was an eloquent red herring.

sight impaired

His aesthetics developed like a cataract upon the eye; clouding, occluding, preventing him from seeing and recognizing real accomplishment by other modes.

well dry

Went to word well too often.

regard the strange

The foreign words stopped his eye and asked for due regard.

immortal form

Time stays, the canyon stays;
Their houses stay, split rock
Mortared with clay, and small.
And the shards, grey, plain or painted,
In the pale roseate dust reveal, conceal
The patterns of their days,
Speak of the pure form of the shattered pot.

We do not recreate, we rediscover
The immortal form, that, once created
Stands unchanged
In Time’s unchanging room.

—Janet Lewis, from “The Ancient Ones, Betátakin,” The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000)

More about Janet Lewis.

fame by such means

Early on he planned on becoming a famous poet. Oh well.