digging and sifting

Less creativity and more archaeology; that is, less imagination and more psychic excavation.

figure esquisse

If there’s no word for something, we can always use others to sketch its outline.

as in love

Don’t go for the fast word. Wait for the fated word.

human document

I most admire those writers who lived to write.

[Thinking of Jim Harrison.]

endlessness

I am interested in the ways language can suggest or provoke (though never surround) an endlessness.

—Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1993)

coruscating course

A long poem flecked with many lyrics.

character slide

A critic who began his career as a curmudgeon but in time became a crank.

[Thinking of Karl Shapiro.]

reflexive property

He said that poetry was difficult. Like life?, I said.

loss for words

This is a poem that should be quickly translated into a dying language.

in the end is the beginning

A gifted lyric poet who lacked only the ability to see that he was rewriting one poem.

comic turn

After modernism, formal poetry became a special case of light verse.

moving parts

Practical or sensitive form—that the artist feels relationships, i.e. weights, measures, durations, correspondences, gravities, propulsions, and cooperates to set them in motion. The physical universe has “laws” of motion and the artist is sensitive to them. Here language—as well as paint, tones struck from the string—is a “matter” of vibrations; and form has to do with the working in structures of moving parts.

—Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetic Form,” The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of Their Work (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979) edited by Reginald Gibbons

spinning wheel

This section of your poem is just buffering.

fast talkers

An interview is a casual shortcut to exposing (for the interviewer) and to espousing (for the interviewed poet) a method and a poetics.

universal accord

Criticism tries to steady the jangly localities of taste by striking a universal chord.

horsemen pass by

The barbarians didn’t ransack the library because they didn’t know what it was.

[I realized after posting this one that I'd perhaps lifted the notion from Karl Shapiro's essay "The Poetry Wreck."]

attempts to revisit

To revise one attempts to revisit the original psychic space of the piece’s composition.

overplatoed his hand

Plato, courageous almost beyond belief, secure in his own literary powers, nevertheless appears to discard his own defensive irony when he rejects Homer in the Republic. Scholars of philosophy are not very wary in regard to Plato’s blunder, because (at their best) philosophy is for them a way of life. But Plato sought to replace Homer as the culture of Greece, which was as likely as demoting Shakespeare for the English-speaking world, Goethe for the Germans, Tolstoy for the Russians, Montaigne and Descartes for the French. I would add Walt Whitman for the New World, except that we have not yet learned how to read him, except for a handful: Thoreau, Hart Crane, Borges, Pessoa, Neruda.

—Harold Bloom, “The Greeks: Plato’s Contest with Homer,” Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Riverhead Books, 2004)

long gone

I read the poem for a while, and then, my being unnecessary to its course, I just let it go on without me.

incarcerated

A poem locked in the prison of the canon.

cause of death

To a poet suicide is death by a natural cause.

money pit

Are manuscript contest entry fees and other submission fees draining the disposable income that poets have for buying poetry books?

in closing

If nothing else, the last line has pride of place.

breeze of surprise

     There are so many ways to go, the detectives know, opposition and conflict, theories drifting over and beyond one another. Things changed by the act of observation. The old laws of physics. Speed and position. Time and distance.
     They will comb through images, looking for any random detail, the breeze of surprise, a clue. The more obscure the moment, the more valuable the knowledge. There is always a chance they will spot something they already overlooked.
     They work in much the same way as poets: the search for a random word, at the right instance, making the poem itself much more precise.

—Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

impaired

One might say the last two lines of that sonnet were ‘the odd couplet’.

public storage space

The prose poem’s great flaw is that it’s anything and all.

cast out

A poem that was read as though it were a magic spell.

personal library

I visited the reestablished Thomas Jefferson Library in the Library of Congress yesterday. Some titles have not been replaced from the original catalog. Jefferson ordered his books according to Lord Bacon's system of the subject areas: Memory, Reason, and Imagination. Jefferson used the categories "History," "Philosophy," and "Fine Arts."

ticking line

Meter is a lateral clock.

core story

The poem was a thumbnail novel.

echo chamber

That is, in poetry more than in any other verbal genre, readers bring an expectation that not only do all the elements matter down to the comma and the white space at the end of a line and between or within stanzas, but that each of those elements, no matter how widely arrayed, may tug at other elements and condition the whole. The poem is an echo chamber where we listen to the reverberations that otherwise dissolve into the white noise of anxiety.

—Lee Upton, “Poetry, Defined. Briefly.” Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo Press, 2012)

comedy club

I couldn’t be sure if he was a critic or a heckler.

[Thinking of William Logan.]

battle lines

There are many ways to go wrong in writing a political poem, but the number is no greater than those encountered in writing a love poem.

press press pull

Each line a lever in that strange contraption called a poem.

passing fancy

Engaged in a language dalliance.

the fruit

The Fruit

This is how I want the poem to be:
trembling with light, coarse with earth,
murmuring with waters and with wind.

—Eugénio de Andrade, 28 Portuguese Poets (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2015), translated by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levtin.

Os Frutos

Assim eu queria o poema:
frementa de luz, áspero de terra,
rumoroso de águas e de vento.

hard cases

He wrote poems with words that don’t fit well into poems.

nth sense

Poetry is a human sensory faculty as yet not fully understood.

late bloomer

Sometimes one of the best poets of a previous century only emerges in the next.

[Thinking of the Frost.]

giant killer

A haiku that could humble a poem of a hundred lines.

minimal inventory

Practical Philosophy
     Baruch Spinoza, by profession a lens-grinder, spent the last years of his life in lodgings on the Pavilion Gracht, in the Hague, most of his time in one room, often taking his meals there, and sometimes not leaving it for several days when he was at work on a project. His first biographer listed his final possessions: “The inventory of a true philosopher. Some small books, some engravings, a few lenses and the instruments to polish them.” His desk, containing letters and unpublished works, was sent to his publisher in Amsterdam.
     A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us.

—Susan Howe, “Vagrancy in the Park,” The Quarry (New Directions, 2015).

high bar

When asked: “Do people still read poetry?” “Some do,” I said, “but only the smart ones.”

wrapping paper

He saved drafts of poems and used the sheets to wrap small gifts.

slack structure

Lines sag when the words don’t have weight.

poison cup

When form falsifies content.

amorphous couch

The poet tends to get too comfortable in the inchoate.

make mountainous

For hours and days on end he [Cézanne] sought out ways to make unintelligible the obvious, and to find for things easily understood an inexplicable basis. As time went by, a secret watchfulness settled in his eyes from so much precise circling of contours that became for him edges of a mystery. An entire quiet lifetime he spent fighting inaudibly and, one might be tempted to say, with nobility, to make mountainous—if such a paraphrase might suffice—the frame of things.

—Robert Walser, “A Discussion of a Picture,” Looking at Pictures (Christine Burgin/New Directions, 2015), translated by Lydia Davis.

higher calling

Frustrated with my poetry, I decided to remake myself into the proverbial ‘ideal reader’.

line too far

A fifteenth line was called for, so it wasn’t a sonnet after all.

young and old

The young poet and old poet are both working with a similar disadvantage: One has few experiences and the other has too many memories.

each is and thus defines

It is only in poem by written poem that poetry is defined.

intensity justified

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

—C. D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, ) p. 61.

personal library

Thinking back on the simple bookshelf I built in my bedroom, the couple dozen poetry books I had hardly filled one shelf, yet they seemed a great library to me.

place each word

Word by well-placed word, build me a word palace.

word slathered

You have lavished language upon me but have revealed nothing.

continuous shriek

The confessional poet’s writing style could be described as ‘scream of consciousness’.

never know exactly

Stevens in one of his last poems says he imagines as a kind of final act of nature a bird singing ‘without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song.’ The idea that every creature has its own reality scared poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, made some of them feel we were groping blindly---it in effect kicked us out of the comfortable anthropocentric community—but it also allowed some modern poets this sense of absolute mystery at the core of existence. It came of knowing that we would never know exactly what a bird’s experience is, or what an ant’s experience is. It has been an unhousing of the imagination, and it was brought on by the thrust of science to be at home in the world by understanding it. It said we move among great powers and mysteries and only glimpse their meanings, the meaning of what it’s like to be another creature, and therefore also the meaning of being a self, a person.

—Robert Hass, The Poetic Species: A conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass (Bellevue Literary Press, New York, 2014, p. 55-56.)

high clear sound

A train whistle and other things inherently poetic.

technical drawing

A manuscript page so heavily marked with lines and arrows he mistook it at first for a schematic or map.

yikes and yikes again

The double-horror of realizing one has accidentally plagiarized a terrible writer.

tough crowd

I like writing in a room full of books where the titled spines reprove each written word.

indirect light

An aphorism makes you squint like when a stray ray of light hits the corner of your eye.

stay alive

We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it. Because poetry alone carries the truth of “is-ness.”

—Marie Howe, BOMB 61, Fall 1997, interview by Victoria Redel.

t-boned

Metaphor that is less like attachment and more like collision.

poem factory

Unfortunately he used forms as though they were molds for pouring in content and making very similar poems.

scene rendered

It’s all about the quality of the description.

vision shifted

“White writing” appeared in my art the way flowers explode over the earth at a given time. With this method I found I could paint the frenetic rhythms of the modern city, something I couldn’t even approach with Renaissance techniques. In other words, through calligraphic line I was able to catch the restless pulse of our cities today. I began working this way in England—in Devonshire in 1935—when I returned from the Orient, where I’d studied Chinese brushwork. So in gentle Devonshire during the night, when I could hear the horses breathing in the field, I painted Broadway and Welcome Hero. In the process I probably experienced the most revolutionary sensations I have ever had in art, because while one part of me was creating these two works, another part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in battle. It may be difficult for one who doesn’t paint to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his angle of vision is being shifted.

—Mark Tobey, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (Da Capo Press, 2000), interviews by Katherine Kuh.

become art

They say you can make art out of anything; but some things have to become art.

no outré there

A confessional poet whose life might be mistaken for that of a saint.

airborne

The lines were like a handful of straw held up to the wind.

not equal

Words have meanings and through language convey semantic sense, but in poetry there are no equal signs.

the instant, the quick

For an essential part of Lawrence’s genius was his fluency; and I mean something more literal than the ease with which he wrote: rather, the sense of direction in all the flowing change and variation in his work. This fluency has its own forms without its own conventions. It is not plottable: ear-count, finger-count and what might be called the logic of received form have nothing to do with it. What matters is the disturbance. ‘It doesn’t depend on the ear, particularly,’ he once wrote, ‘but on the sensitive soul.’ It is something that can never be laid out into a system, for it comes instead from the poet’s rigorous but open alertness…Lawrence’s controlling standard was delicacy: a constant, fluid awareness, nearer the checks of intimate talk than those of regular prosody. His poetry is not the outcome of rules and formal craftsmanship, but of a purer, more native and immediate artistic sensibility. It is poetry because it could not be otherwise.

He was well aware of what he was about. He put his case in the introduction to New Poems:

'To break the lovely form of metrical verse, and dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre, this is what most of the free-versifers accomplish. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm…It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying for those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick.'

—A. Alvarez, “Lawrence’s Poetry: A Single State of Man,” D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet (Harper and Row, 1973). Essay originally published in A. Alvarez’s The Shaping Spirit (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).

genre hunger

Poet, be a genre eater.

flows over

Whether slight or expansive, a good poem is always a superfluity.

a way without words

He even translated the silences well.