silence is the invisible kingdom

Silence in poetry is the place where words come from. The space between an event and that event becoming a poem. Silence stands at the gate, at the opening of the field. Silence gives substance to poems the way death does in life. It is the invisible parts of the poetry. It is the invisibility of what is about to appear. Like a king of the play who is invisible, held back in the wings to build up the tension. The invisible all around us in this world without our seeing it until the poem speaks. The invisible and the silence go hand and hand in poetry. Like the night train pounding through the dark town in Texas as the dogs bark. Silence is emptiness just a little afterwards. Silence is what’s invisible until the poem makes it visible. There is a huge silence built up by implication. The silence that fills up our metaphors, pretending one thing and meaning the invisible other. It is the silence of Basho's haiku. It is what's invisible in the fragments of Emily Dickinson. Silence is the invisible kingdom that the poet makes us see.

(Jack Gilbert writes this and pushes the paper across the table to Linda Gregg.)

[The above is something handwritten by Jack Gilbert late in his life. It was transcribed by me in a phone conversation with Linda Gregg, 01-30-14.]

trash poem

A merz poem: A poem constructed of words and phrases most poets would consider clearly unpoetic or just cultural trash.

no turning point

Prose poet: one whose lines run but won’t turn.

not mine

I found a poem in one of my old notebooks written by someone I hardly knew.

objects at rest

     It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic, at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.
     In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.
     Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law and beyond it.

—Pablo Neruda, “Toward an Impure Poetry,” Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 (Grove Press, 1983), translated by Ben Belitt.

extra punctuation

Poetry, as opposed to prose, has two additional means of punctuation: the line break and the space.

pressed flowers

The flowers were more preserved than the pages of verse in which they were pressed.

corporeal punishment

The last line felt like being spanked.

importantly missing

Don't be afraid to forget some of the words. Nor worry if they don't come to you.

overline

A line the rest of the poem could never live up to.

winged creatures

At night all the books I haven’t read lift from their perches in the bookcases and fly up, pages flapping wildly, fly up the stairway to my bedroom, they fly about my head at night, they try to disturb my sleep with the shame of their flapping pages. Waking in the morning, often I find one, splayed open where it has fallen upon the bedcovers.

who have loved beautiful things

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

―Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Co., 2013)

[The painting: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654)]

timing device

He would try to get at least the outline of the poem down before the tea kettle whistled.

hearing things

He gave the poem a close reading for the ear.

hard case

The poem was not obscure, it was obdurate; made of poetic material impervious to casual reading.

engaging tongue and ear

Tonight I read Yeats aloud for about an hour, and I shall do this. An hour in the morning and an hour at night. Up to the inventing of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after that, all reading was done aloud….Eliot says the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can….Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain which are used for vision. Not all the brain. This means a silent reader’s literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud—tongue and ear.

—Ted Hughes in a letter to Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar and Giroux, 1956), selected and edited by Christopher Reid.

odd old bricks

A hundred years hence will all those author photos with backdrops of bookcases seem like the writers were posing in front of ruins?

stitching it together

The alphabet is your sewing kit.

life-giving skill

The critic can only do an autopsy of the poem. In the act of revision, the poet must have the skill and confidence of a surgeon holding the living organs of a poem in his/her hands.

hurray-hurray, step right up...

Blurb writers and other carnival barkers of literature.

likeminded

The creator dreams of a kindred mind called a reader.

against the dark

Poetry

Against the dark night
a glowing screen
and a blank page.

by José Emilio Pacheco
(translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

Mexican Writers on Writing (Trinity Univ. Press, 2007), edited by Margaret Sayers Peden.

wait for it

Often a single miracle is performed at an open mike.

words equal to life

A passage achieves quotation when there’s an equation between its words and experience.

sound scape

Longhand: The sound of words being scratched out (in both senses) on paper.

sales and tales

The poet was a memoir monger.

words that we need

Songs are thoughts which are sung out with the breath when people let themselves be moved by a great force. . . When the words that we need shoot up of themselves, we have a new song.

Orpingalik, an elder of the Netsilingmiut (Netsilik Eskimo), cited in “The place where you go to listen,” by J. L. Adams, Terra Nova: Nature and Culture, 2(3), 1997, 15-16.

[Qoute encountered in Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007) by Tim Ingold.]

reaching for

Each line seemed to be an arm reaching out in the dark.

poetry reading poetry reading

Is there anything worse than hearing a poem about a poetry reading at a poetry reading?

a fin

Prose is all cartilage / poetry a fin.

—John Olson, from “Marsden Hartley’s Gloves,” Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2008)

same poem

They asked why he kept writing the same kind of poem. He said it was the kind of poem he liked.

comb through

I could feel those lines of poetry comb through my soul.

entropic poetics

It starts with those arbitrary and disassociative sequences which turn to random fragments; randomness leads to entropy, and entropy to boredom.

time stamped

Where some see avant-garde and mainstream, I just see poets scrambling and scraping, trying to write poems that will stick beyond the contemporary.

quid pro no

The poet has no responsibility to the critic. The critic tries to pay a debt by proving he/she owes nothing to the author.

luminous detail

Ezra Pound makes the distinction between “multitudinous detail*” and “luminous detail” in a poem, the latter being that image that suggests so many others because it is connected somehow to the world, the universe, the collective experience of any number of people. We can make a list of all the images we remember from eighth grade, and try to fit as many possible into a poem (the multitudinous method), or we can try for those few that glow with connections, that suggest others (the luminous method). So many lasting poems are made of recollected, luminous detail.

—David Citino, “Tell Me How It Was in the Old Days,” The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002)

*Ezra Pound, Selected prose, 1909-1965, William Cookson ed., New Directions, 1973, 22.

hive poem

Opening the anthology, I realized the canonical poem was almost humming, as though it was now just a hive of critical voices.

relative value

I’d rather own the best work by a minor artist than one of the lesser pieces by a great one.

erase or raise

You hear about a lot of poetry projects involving erasure from existing texts. But no one seems to use the caret…inserting additional material into a source text. Perhaps it’s easier to electively erase. Harder to hoist the banner of one’s own words within the text of another.

larger interests

As just sounds and marks I wouldn’t care a whit for words.

border war

Two writers fighting for the limelight of who is most liminal.

not embarrassed

Millay has been overlooked by the critics of our time until very recently. Two new biographies have ushered in an era in which, I trust, Millay will be brought back into the light she deserves. In all my undergraduate and graduate courses in the seventies and eighties, she was never mentioned, but The Collected Poems, a hardback, given to me by my father one Christmas when I was in college, has been on the shelf by every desk at which I have ever written a word. When I read “Renascence”—her juvenilia, really—I am not embarrassed, either for her or for me. She was learning how to write and I was learning how to read. We started thinking big. We knew, or thought we knew, that for a women’s writing to be taken seriously, we should aim for the “universal,” and what is more universal than all the human cries that ever cried? It is not a sin to overwrite. That is another thing she taught me: not to be embarrassed by large feeling, and not to be embarrassed to let your reader know of that large feeling.

—Robin Behn, “In the Music Room,” Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen.

poet second

Paul Valéry, a poet known almost entirely for his poetics and aesthetic thought.

bigger than that

A theme that couldn’t be reduced to a single word or a short phrase.

who's zoomin' who

Poets rightly fear the powers of their translators.

freedom of information act

As readers we may ask on what, and how many, levels are we allowed to engage this poem. We won’t always get an answer, but we get to ask.

bright birds yet unseen

I hear a hitherto unknown species of bird has been found in the forests of Malaysia. Scanning my bookcases I feel certain there are bright and rare poems yet undiscovered behind those spines. But as wonderful as they are, only human encounter makes them existent.

chute to the unknown

He tended to end a poem with a line that was like pulling the lever to a trapdoor.

find the grain

In his long life (seventy-six years) Oppen wrote little prose and fewer than 300 pages of verse. If we have more of him than we have of Catullus, it’s not by much. He prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy. He’d been a tool-and-die maker and a cabinet worker. He once interrupted some blather about Biblical translation by remarking that what they needed for the job was a carpenter: no, better: “a Jewish carpenter.”

     WORKMAN

     Leaving the house each dawn I see the hawk
     Flagrant over the driveway. In his claws
     That dot, that comma
     Is the broken animal: The dangling small beast knows
     The burden that he is: he has touched
     The hawk’s drab feathers. But the carpenter’s is a culture
     Of fitting, of firm dimensions,
     Of post and lintel. Quietly the roof lies
     That the carpenter has finished. The sea birds circle
     The beaches and cry in their own way,
     The innumerable sea birds, their beaks and their wings,
     Over the beaches and the sea’s glitter.

[poem by George Oppen]

—Hugh Kenner, “George Oppen: In Memoriam,” Poetry Project Newsletter, Oct. 1984 , Mazes: essays by Hugh Kenner (North Point Press, 1989).

not about words

Afraid the poem would be about something, the poet wrote what amounted to nothing but words.

far-sighted

He couldn’t write the long poem because he could always see the end from the start.

end this mess

It wasn’t that the poem was looking for an epiphany; it was looking for any kind of ending that would make sense of what came before.

exercise room

Trying to teach poetry with the ‘freeing strictures’ of exercises/prompts.

hiding in plain sight

Poetry in prose camouflage.

taste and timelessness

How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one’s own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened ways through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn’t or no longer moves me. But there are, however and thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice.

—C. K. Williams, “On Being Old,” In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

word poor

A poem afflicted by vocabulary deficiency syndrome.

failing better

It was that kind of poem wherein all its evident failings pointed to a bright future for the poet’s further efforts.

meaning grounded

The poet imagines he can escape the realm of the semantic.

look back askance

Craft is always retrospective.

hidden transmitter

A good poem will always continue broadcasting from an undisclosed location.

alien point-blank green

ARRIVAL AT THE WALDORF

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,

Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say “The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,”
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

— Wallace Stevens, Parts Of A World (1942)

Yesterday afternoon was the 18th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Bonnie Costello featured this poem in her talk entitled "Traveling with Wallace Stevens." In his work as a surety bond lawyer for the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Stevens traveled extensively in the U.S. for a time, but he never traveled farther than Key West.

site and vector

The subject matters: A matter of perspective or approach.

arrogant tyrant

Confronted with unruly language, the poet has the arrogance of Xerxes at the Hellespont. He’ll whip with chains that flow & flux of language to no avail.

refuge for the real

Poetry as the last refuge for those still possessed with a feeling for what is real.

bloodless

The anemic criticism of one who has clearly not read beyond the contemporaries.

point on the horizon

The linebreak as a vanishing point you can’t quite see beyond.

price and peril

I’m going to read you his [Baudelaire’s] poem called The Albatross. It’s a famous poem, and rightly so. Here is the poet before the awful pride carried away his hopes. Here is the poet as misfit and vulnerable. Behold, as Nietzsche wrote, the man!

   Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
   Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
   Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
   Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

   No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
   Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
   Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
   His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

   How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak—
   He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
   They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
   Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

   The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
   A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
   Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
   He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.*

This poem, I think, captures the poet and the predicament in the same net. Here is the price—and the peril. The journals say nothing that the spirit-bird of this verse does not soar above, and leave far behind. This verse stands as a tribute to the ravishing, indelible, undeniable, body of what he was able to accomplish during his short time on earth. The belled reminder of his star-graces, after all that subterranean din.

—Yahia Lababidi, The Artist As Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2010) by Alex Stein.

*Richard Howard translation, Les Fleurs Du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (Godine, 1985)

serifs, filigrees and flourishes

Without a compelling subject the poet always overcompensates with style.

rote tales

The myths are all musty. To echo Sam Goldwyn, “What we need is some new myths.”

over and under

A competently handled translation transcends the original as often as it fails to meet the original on equal terms.

half measures

Poets write criticism as though they were unaware of all the resources of prose.

person first

I go to the reading to experience the personality behind the poetry, not for the performance of the poetry.

real sentiment

     Remind me how we loved our mother’s body
     our mouths drawing the first
     thin sweetness from her nipples

     our faces dreaming hour on hour
     in the salt smell of her lap Remind me
     how her touch melted childgrief

     how she floated great and tender in our dark
     or stood guard over us
     against our willing

Women performing traditional roles are no longer to be ridiculed but rather understood as products of an oppressive order, with, even so, valuable qualities. The terms of evaluation chosen here may strike some readers as verging on sentimentality, but definitions of sentimentality are always culturally determined: it is not a timeless, abstract quality. (When the word “sentimental” was coined in the eighteenth century, it was used in praiseful contexts.) Direct expression of tender feelings in these lines is no doubt part of the women’s aesthetic Rich has been searching for; in any case, the poem has renounced most of the irony and intellectual artillery of her earlier work. If writing tenderly means losing some readers, Rich is prepared to do so, on the chance that she may be making available feelings formerly dismissed as unacceptable for art. Any occasion for reexamining aesthetic strictures ought, of course, to be welcomed. Do we go to poetry mainly to sharpen the psychic (or conversational) defenses useful in daily life or to gain access to feelings we haven’t, for whatever reason, acknowledged?

—Alfred Corn, “Contemporary Poetry’s Mother Tongues,” Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press, 2009)

free associative fragment

Splinter line.

image in motion

Depicting a movement, a gesture, an action rather than a static image.