harper's logan lite

After reading this piece in Harper’s, Poetry Slam, being an avid reader of contemporary poetry, criticism and reviews of same, my first response was to the by-line: Who’s he, I said to myself, and why am I interested in his critical take on the state of contemporary poetry? I still can’t answer that one. From a quick check of Edmundson’s credentials (on-line) I determined that, other than being an English professor at a major university, he seems to have little or no background in the field of contemporary poetry (which becomes evident by the poets he cites and his severely limited viewpoint). Edmundson is neither a poet actively engaged in the art, nor is he a well-published critic or reviewer of contemporary poetry.

What was Harper’s agenda in publishing this piece of drive-by criticism? To stir things up among contemporary poets? Not the biggest playground to trot out an unknown no-nothing bully onto. I guess someone more qualified, like William Logan, wasn’t available. Because I think of Edmundson as a William Logan wannabe, one who is trying to take a shortcut to the role of naysayer without doing the requisite reviewing, the thrashing and trashing, that Logan has done over the years.

let none set asunder

The metaphor is an unholy yoking that somehow holds true.

forces equal

First a workshop should be a force-field of informed and attentive intellects, one that the poet recognizes her/his poem must be strong enough to resist.

world view

after Bronk

Words
occur
to gather

a world —

not the

world.

—Joseph Massey
Big Bridge #12

lost then found

Many, many poems must be lost in order that a few may be found, and remembered.

bio note

He is a wildly-unanthologized poet whose work has not appeared in Poetry, APR and The Paris Review. Critics have been unable to find fault with his work because they’ve been unable to find any. His prizes include a blue ribbon earned in the third grade for the poem “Lollipop” and the $100 scratch-off lottery card he got at the gas station.

concept emotes

A conceptual poem needn’t lack emotion.

just jossing

Wallace Stevens once quipped (in his “Adagia”), “Poetry is a kind of money.” Which always makes me wonder, What kind of currency?: Confederate?, counterfeit?, or joss money? Yes, joss, I think I can smell it burning to favor the dead.

gauging the language

As long as a reader can feel through the language that the poet knows something important is going on, the reader will go along. As soon as the reader senses that what is behind the language is trivial, all is lost.

zero point

It is evident that poetry shares with all speech that is language-like an incompetence with respect to consummatory states of experience. All indicators of temporaliity—including the present tense—signify distance from the origin of experience…As evidence of this, consider the following very simple observation: there are many poems of not yet having (petitional poems, as it were, or poems of seduction), and there are also poems (though proportionally to the first type many fewer) of having had (doxological poems as it were, e.g., the aubade). But there are no poems (certainly no Western poems) situated upon the zero point of having, of union just so. At that moment, the coincidence of consciousness and experience, language disappears and with it representation as depiction….

—Allen Grossman, “Hard Problems in Poetry, Especially Valuing,” True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing (U. of Chicago Press, 2009)

eternal singer

Whenever I hear the personal I-lyric denigrated by this or that theoretical notion, my mind flashes on Sappho, and like Solon (the Wise) I think I’ll die happy.

trading deadline

The MFA program traded its masthead Pulitzer Prize winner, a prima-donna by all accounts, for two poets with Pushcarts and a Lannan fellow to be named later.

voice over vanity

For me, poetry is the voice that supersedes vanity. To concentrate exclusively on “American poetry” can ignore the vast expanse of immigrant sounds bearing punctuated rhythms or haunting, free-floating tunes. Music introduces the meaning, and carries languages both harsh and melodious, its premonitions understood only in retrospect.

—Laura Manuelidis, "The XYZ of Hearing: The Squid’s Ink,” Poetry (July/August, 2013)

conceptual life

Vanessa Placeholder, until something better comes along.

[See: "Poetry is dead, I killed it"]

random acts of poetry

When he got back to his parked car, he thought he’d been given a ticket, but someone had stuck a poem under one of the wiperblades.

uses of erudition

A scholarly erudition employed for uncovering versus a speculative erudition used for discovery.

information please

It’s not that the poetry was prose that was the problem. Good prose can equal or even exceed poetry on many levels. The problem was that this particular prose was unwilling to give up its inherent attachment to information: prose with its natural empathy for the reader’s need to know more. Poetry is always too ready to ignore the reader’s need for information.

parodic critic

Is criticism only a kind of parody? A secondary text that even as it calls into question marks itself as quasi.

went through

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched‎’ by it all.

In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.

—Paul Celan, "Edgar Jené and The Dream About The Dream," Collected Prose (Carcanet, 1986), translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

redundant dummy

Why does the introducer read a whole poem by the poet he’s about to introduce?

title peel

The title was a bad roof in need of a tear off.

working on the short game

When did I put aside the idea that one day I’d start a novel?

dashed lightning

Dickinson without her dashes, like Zeus sans thunderbolts.

no shopping list

And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.

—June Jordan, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People (Routledge, 1995), edited by Lauren Miller.

[Quoted from Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing (T&WBooks, 2003), edited by Christina Davis & Christopher Edgar.]

unusual suspects

The unexpected character proves to be the strongest poet, the strongest reader.

as though entitled

I struck through the word only because it seemed a bit too pleased and comfortable in its place.

unnecessary information

Always the temptation of more than enough information in a poem that tells a story.

no waiting in this world

Poet, don’t wait for inspiration, initiate through experience.

fixed xp

Let's just say he was fixedly inside the experimental camp.

sound and structure

And I'd done a lot of reading. James Huneker on music. And a lot of poetry—Milton, Shelley, Whitman. Robinson Jeffers came along in the '20s or later—he was tremendous. I liked Milton for the same reason I liked Jeffers, the sound and the structure. I don't believe anything that Milton wrote about, but it has a wonderful presence.

—Ansel Adams, from in his last interview, ART NEWS, Volume 83/No 6, interview by Milton Esterow.

no echo

When a good poet and good person has died, it feels as though a great hole in the earth has opened and it will give back no echo.

[R.I.P. Kurt Brown]

scale counts

There are wild, unwieldy poems that can survive many ill locutions, and then there are seemingly perfect poems that fail because of one wrong word.

lost critical grip

Driven to critical distraction by the poem.

any end

A last line so perfect one felt it would fit under any of a thousand poems.

party crashers

The poem was a wild party of words, where you imagined some words were eyeing one another, thinking how did he/she get in here.

phrasally compounded

Phrases, rather than clauses, must be the units of expression. This was Blake’s mode of choice in most of his work, from The French Revolution through Jerusalem.

[…] Sentences were more phrasally compounded, less clausally complex than ever before or since. Nouns and adjectives, in natural consequence, strongly dominated verbs and took over verb meanings. Sounds, like sentences, stressed not limits, periods, bounds, and conclusions as regular feet, line forms, rhymes, and stanzas would do, but rather interior units and correspondences, in echo and onomatopoeia. Reference stressed the objects and qualities of such sensory concern, the scenes, atmospheres, and feelings which could be onomatopoetized, the natural and human items of emotional description with their minor and parallel actions of observation and acceptance.

We may think Blake as too active, rebellious, and eccentric to use such material; yet we find it basically his. What additions he made to it were…not so much changes as extensions of the basic material. He increased the characteristic reference to color, scope, and feeling; he increased human anatomizing, scenic atmosphere, and passive and expressive verbs. He used a fuller load of substantives and descriptive declaration, and a freer play of interior sound. He liked what he had, and carried it further in its own realm.

—Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes In English Poetry (U. of California Press, 1957)

good enough and dogged

Publication is but a modicum of talent combined with persistence.

after rilke

The interior decorator scanned my living room strewn with books, and asserted, “You must rearrange your life.”

nothing to be said

When a true poem is spoken silence is often the only response.

published in air

A poet whose poems were only published in air—that is, read aloud.

ingathers only to disgorge

The poem is reservoir for anything, for everything, only to become font of life, love and loss.

recurrent words

Whitman: arm, beautiful, body, city, come, day, death, earth, eye, face, full, go, good, green, great, hand, hear, joy, know, land, life, light, long, look, love, make, man, night, old, pass, poem, real, rest, rise, sail, sea, see, ship, sing, soul, stand, strong, sun, take, thing, think, time, voice, war, woman, word, work, world, year, young

From Appendix B: "Words Most Used By Ten Poets,"
Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes In English Poetry (U. of California Press, 1957)

gathering floodtide

Some poems start with the force of a wave crashing, while with others we must allow the first few lines to slowly build the momentum of the poem, each passing line gathering the weight of more words taken up in the flow.

seed catalog

I know somewhere in my notebook there are few words waiting for the kind of attention that would have them flower into a full poem.

required letters

To write this poem, you’re almost going to need a new alphabet.

time sensitive

Different times different poems: A poem written late at night. A poem written at first light.

high-five rimes

Let’s just say his rhymes were so predictable and ringing that I thought of them as high-fiving one another.

second trial

Interestingly enough, the best words ever spoken of Howl were said at its obscenity trial in the moment of its emergence. During the second Eisenhower administration things were culturally very tight, and artists and critics, recovering from the McCarthy era, rushed to the defense of a poem attacked by the Establishment. Rarely has an unknown poem by an obscure poet known such high praise before it has been assessed by the scholarly community. But as soon as the trial was over and the battle won, a reverse set in. The poem began its work of effecting a critical reevaluation of the course of poetry, and the defensive reaction was intense. For a few years you could hardly find anyone who would say a good word for it, but gradually its liberating role was effected, and it has emerged as the guerdon of its generation.

—William Everson, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (Oyez, 1976)

faced with nothing

And then the page went limp as white cloth, floated up and settled over your face as though a shroud.

time and materials

Anything can be art, and some of it is.

azure free zone

[Philip Levine] was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.”…Fake language made bad poems.

—Mark Levine, “Philip Levine,” in Remembering Poets, Poetry (March 2013)

terms of engagement

A good critic, particularly one who is a poet, puts his/her aesthetics aside in order to properly engage another poet on his/her own terms.

person of interest

Perhaps when we speak of ‘voice’ what we’re hearing through the language is the poet’s character. In ‘talk poetry’ what we too often get is caricature or the cartoon outline of a person behind the poem.

first reading

A poem is at its best in its first reading.

lower the volume

For the most part, good poets are humble not hortatory.

jolly roger

Poet, hoist high the pirate flag of your poem.

or at least saying

And poetry, to my understanding, is not about saying things, though obviously poems that have interesting things to say are more interesting than poems that don’t. And it is not quite accurate to say that they are about dramatizing the act of saying things or, in the case of an inward poetry, thinking things or, in a quicker and more visceral poetry, perceiving and sensing things. Or at least saying that poetry does these things only takes us partway into them. To go the rest of the way, one needs a formulation that somehow says that poetry inhabits the interior of the rhythm of its way of seeing, its way of dramatizing what it is to say a thing, or think it, or perceive it, or—taking writing as an act of painting—do it.

—Robert Hass, “On Teaching Poetry,” What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (Ecco, 2012)

roses that are looked at

"the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at." So goes a line from the "Burnt Norton" section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. For twenty years that line was in my mind as, "the roses had the look of roses that are looked at." Perhaps some Steinian involution had inflected my memory. I think I like my version better.

truth and beauty

The poet averred her sincerity and the truth of the poems when she read, but then I bought her new book and I saw that her author photo was at least ten years out of date.

audience of one

A poet who never attended readings unless he was reading, or the reader was a poet whose favor he wanted.

sound decision

One who would never sacrifice the right word for the useful sound.

booster seat

As he recited his various publications, he seemed to sit a little higher in his chair. It was then I imagined him sitting on a stack of books.

moment of conviction

The first question in poetry at that time was simply the question of honesty, sincerity. The point for me, and I think for Louis [Zukofsky], too, was the attempt to construct a meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry, from the imagist intensity of vision. If no one were going to challenge me, I would say “a test of truth.” If I had to back it up I’d say anyway, “a test of sincerity.” That there is a moment, in actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from those moments of conviction.

—George Oppen, quoted in Robert Hass’s What Light Can Do (Ecco, 2012)

sentence structure

Despite its effort to undermine, to subvert, even to try to damage the sentence, poetry will find that the sentence is a very resilient and adaptable thing.

practical concerns

Poet, before you take flight, sew your wings on tight.

show me your papers

Be ready to inspect the critic’s credentials at the border (before the review).

not bounded

No matter its first and last line a poem has no beginning or end.

black box

The critic tries to find the poem’s flight recorder sunk somewhere among its wreckage. Sometimes understanding is a futile pursuit.

wild draft

Not only a rough draft, but one that was rugged and wild.

not in the throat

The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.

—Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende (New Directions, 1998), translation by Christopher Maurer.

yet unbroken

The integral lines that broke just the same.

weights and measures

Each word weighed and measured upon the scale of the tongue.

he walks the line

The old verse poet kept iambling along.

impossible and plain

Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.

—Susan Howe, "Scare Quotes II," The Midnight (New Directions, 2003)

poem atop poem

The poem's title was a poem itself.