not god (sic) enough

Even if a god offered to ghost write the poem the poet would demur.

in the public square

A symbol monger. An image grinder. A diction trader. A rhetoric freak. A sound dog.

written over

Critic, create an exegesis that exceeds the text.

reality calling

In ordinary language words call up the reality, but when language is truly poetic, the reality calls up the words.

—Joseph Joubert, Joubert: A Selection from His Thoughts (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1899), translated by Katharine Lyttelton.

not beyond me

Poetry doesn’t need those disappointed poets who have stopped reading and writing poetry only because their work was never recognized.

on the down low

Let’s keep poetry our secret. Otherwise the culture will only ruin it for us.

sargeant major

With a glance at the page, the words started to fall into line and form ranks.

hard reading

A poet of a taxing syntax.

bhizzt phizzt

A typo is a language short circuit. It breaks and effectively ends the transmission as the reader’s mind struggles to create the proper connection.

keep an animal

[The poet’s] tragedy is summed up in these word written in a private letter by a contemporary American poet: “For more than a month I have not been able to find time to write anything, and you know how heavy that is to a writer who feels all of youth lost to keep an animal.” Here is the animal, crying to be feed and warmed and housed. Here is the poet, who cannot rest from wanting to set down the bit of reality that he has been able to seize.

—Babette Deutsch, “The Plight of Poetry,” The American Mercury (May 1926)

small window

He talked in those commonplaces of the workshop method, thus you could tell that everything he knew about poetry was learned in the couple of years he’d spent in a MFA program.

not the breaking point

For all its effects, the only thing important about the linebreak is that it shouldn’t be where the reader stops reading.

see-saw

The inverse ratio of heft of content to height of rhetoric.

high notes

He only wanted to sing the arias.

covenant of pathos

Stuck for a day in Chicago, I wandered over to The Art Institute of Chicago. (Not that anyone had to twist my arm. We're talking about visiting one of the great museums of the world.) In the Modern wing I happened upon an unattractive though clearly expressionistic portrait by Ludwig Meidner. The label stated this:

Though perhaps best known for his visionary, apocalyptic landscapes, Ludwig Meidner, like many German Expressionists, used portraiture to explore the inner emotional life of his subjects. "Do not be afraid of the face of a human being," Meidner once said. "Don’t let your pen stop until the soul of that one opposite you is wedded to yours in a covenant of pathos." In addition to making self-portraits, Meidner painted many of Berlin’s literati, including the Expressionist poet and theater critic Max Herrmann-Neisse. The artist used the thick paint, energetic brushwork, and distorted form characteristic of Expressionist painting to communicate his subject’s inner vitality and psychological life.

odd angle

Critic, see it slant.

no line drawn

The prose poet willingly risks even the genre for the good of the poem.

arrival point

To think of the poem’s end as being an arrival.

flightless bird

So many feathers and sequins, the piece sagged under the weight of its costume.

dead end or avenue

People think that many poems are hard to read because of the vocabulary, proper names, lacunae, allusions, etc., things they don’t readily recognize. That’s not a difficulty, that’s an opportunity to explore new avenues of understanding.

nothing too lavish

In a review of Middle Span by George Santayana, in The New Statesman, June 26, 1948, Raymond Mortimer joined [Santayana] with Picasso as the two living Spaniards most conspicuous for genius and said…
"they have both chosen to be expatriates yet retain under their cosmopolitanism a deep Spanishness—the sense “that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime or too festive, yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a contortion, a comedy of illusions.”

Quoted in Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book, a facsimile and transcription, edited and introduced by Milton J. Bates.

there and not there

Poetry is literature’s dark matter.

take it to the streets

The street poet was threatened by the local authorities with vagrancy and public nuisance. It was then he knew he’d made it as a poet.

earned bona fides

Critics certify themselves review by review.

certain touchstones

Never through my own but only by reading certain poems by others do I realize why I’ve given over so much of my life to poetry.

undimmed by familiarity

Thought proceeds by scheme and sequence; it manipulates, puts things where it wants them, makes different designs from any that the eyes see, and, what is more, know that it is doing so. Conscious art selects from nature and by selecting adds. In the process the forms of nature inevitably take second place; their edges are blunted to fit the ruling design, and the complex final effect, being composed of many parts, diminishes the being of any one part. Yet the price of this triumph is violation of our senses. We evidently see at any moment a sequence of sharp particulars—the light at a window, a tree trunk, the gray of a rock—single, peremptory impressions, moving in endless specificity across our vision. A part of our life belongs to them; we know the world and feel at home in it not least through these sure reminders. Happiness, one sometimes thinks, is clarity of vision, moments when things stand clear in sharpest outline, undimmed by familiarity as if revealed for the first time. Such moments bring back, so to speak, the memory of Eden sparkling on the first day of creation, the tree of life soaring in the middle, and if Eden be related to our childhood, they bring back childhood too. In this spirit Gladstone entitled his book on Homer Juventus Mundi, the world’s youth…

—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Heroic Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)

working dog

A critic should be a terrier let loose in a thicket of letters.

figures in space

The poem’s rhetorical figures reminded one of watching a troupe of acrobats going through their convoluted routines.

limits of understanding

A great poem cannot be taught, it can only be explored together intelligently.

foreplay

The title titillated but that was it.

impressed hard

I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.

—George Tooker (1920-2011), American artist.

overdressed

A minor poet draped in the mantle of his long poem.

currency trade

If poetry is a kind of money it’s as mysterious in value as bitcoin.

lost articles

The poems only his notebook has known.

lean into the corner

All one expects of the word at the end of a line is that it holds the corner.

walk as prophecies

As {Wm.] James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets. They too urged that men should walk as prophecies of the next age rather than in the fear of God or in the light of Reason. Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” deliberately and explicitly enlarged the meaning of the term “poetry.” That word, he said, “may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination.’” In this wider sense, he said, poetry is “connate with the origin of man.” It was, he went on to say, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.” It is “something divine…at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and the blossom of all other systems of thought.” Just as the Enlightenment had deified Reason, so Shelley and other romantics deified what I have been calling “The Imagination.”

—Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (U. of Virginia Press, 2017)

bounty not border

Poetry’s allegiance is to the resources of language and not to the boundaries of genre.

aspiring attendant

Each stanza should be a poem-in-waiting.

mishandled analog device

The young man picked up the book, then fumbled around looking for its power button.

stop, look and listen

Poet, be a fearless witness.

goodbye to lonnie

Warning: Writing and/or reading poetry is good for your health. I urge non-poetry readers to open-mindedly browse through the pages of poetry books, especially the works of contemporary poets who amplify our daily ordinariness with craftsmanship and courage. To truly appreciate the language of poetry is to be able to come back to it again and again. Not with wisdom supplied by educators or cerebral articles addressing The Real Meaning, but a willingness to allow the senses to be stirred and nourished. Even reading poetry as a child, I never worried if I “got” it.
     Often students ask where my ideas stem from. Naively I refer to a barrage of inspirations, bowing to the commonplace and the patois of my childhood. But mostly they are guided by the opening of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God...“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” That one sentence embodies a poetry I crave to attain. In retrospect there was always a thirst, a growing growl, to tackle and nonchalantly lay down words capable of breathing on their own. At times I’m not quite sure how to start or even where a poem may end. Though the writing process often gets the better of me, I welcome the taste of language and the ability to share it with others. One’s imagination is always on the brink of something else. There’s an old saying that there’s never anybody around when you wrestle with an angel. Nonetheless, poets write because they have to…and the angels know it.
     It is rare that people actually go after the things they want to do and become in their lifetimes. Far too many wave back at their dreams. Through poetry I am able to passionately be on board with my wishes.

—Lonnie Black (1958-2016), prose piece originally published in Hartford Courant's Northeast Magazine.

more is required

A poet who believed he was an activist because he’d ranted a few poems at readings.

new poetics

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.

—Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

risked capital

A good critic is a market maker.

no promise made

A poet makes a poem not a promise. And the reader’s disappointment is of minor concern.

enough already

The poet never thinks ‘More could be said about this’.

must be something there

He went back into the old drafts for a cold case to solve.

that poetics

1
That the struggle of the poem is between the unmet and the undue.

3
That poetry is encounter science.

4
That the poem is that which ‘finally accumulates’.

7
That the belief of the poet is not satisfied by the poem.

0b
That the vocation of poetry is toward disownership.

10
That poetry is the undoing of the still life.

12
That the poem is not “contaminated by ambivalence” but is clearly equivocal.

15
That poetry is not destination-based.

16
That where we meet the surface of the poem is where we meet the unfitting.

34
That the poet is a theorist of need.

44
That poetry remains a broad permission.

4a

That poetry is a wilderness prior to philosophy.

4e

That poetry is custodian to wakefulness.

53

That poetry is right to turn away.

64

That the world is replete, and repetition merely a spoken word.

7b

That the world is never said enough.

—A Maxwell, Conversion Table (Mindmade Book, 2016)

flipping past

A cavalcade of disparate images: You have entered the age when poets have grown up not with a pen, but with a TV remote control in their hands.

trader not traitor

Traduttori traditori (“translators traitors”); no, traduttori commercianti (“translators traders”).

textbook echo

Another poem of recycled historical rage.

form in transit

Form is nothing but an instant within a transition.

—Henri Bergson

[Quoted in “Georges Jouve The Creator,” Georges Jouve: Minimalist Ceramic Works (L’Arc Seine New York Gallery, 2005) exhibition catalog.]

underlined

Make each line quotable.

too good

Blessed with a bit too much facility for the felicitous.

late remark

L'esprit de l'escalier…when reading, one might say, 'the wit of the turned page'.

talk it out, way out

The poem crossed over from talk poetry to just crazy talk.

past that matters

I asked [Akhmatova] if she would ever annotate the Poem Without a Hero: the allusions might be unintelligible to those who did not know the life it was concerned with; did she wish them to remain in darkness? She answered that when those who knew the world about which she spoke were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too; it would be buried with her and her century; it was not written for eternity, not even for posterity: the past alone had significance for poets—childhood most of all—those were the emotions that they wished to re-create and re-live. Vaticination, odes to the future, even Pushkin’s great epistle to Chaadaev, were a form of declamatory rhetoric, a striking of grandiose attitudes, the poet’s eye peering into a dimly discernable future, a pose which she despised.

—Isaiah Berlin, “Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak,” Isaiah Berlin: The Proper Study of Mankind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

pang or spur

Reading for me has the unfortunate side effect of causing a pang of ignorance whenever I encounter a name, a place or an event I’m unfamiliar with. Rather than a pang, perhaps I should think of it as a spur, urging me on.

elevated speech

She spoke in such full and well-composed sentences that a conversation with her was like reading a good book.

got it second hand

The way he criticized the poem seemed like received opinion; no original work had been done on the piece.

impress

Most academics don’t recognize university presses as a form of vanity publication.

found incomplete

There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets! They don’t seek the ideal in complicated things—they find it in the incomplete.

—Peter Altenberg, “Aphorisms” Telegrams from the Soul (Archipelago Books, 2005)

no language cage

We know a great poem strains to the point of bursting the bounds of its language, but even as it does so it defies any other language to try to capture it in translation.

hard thing

Those of you who are real artists know well enough all the special advice I can give you, and in how few words it may be said—follow nature, study antiquity, make your own art, and do not steal it, grudge no expense of trouble, patience, or courage, in the striving to accomplish the hard thing you have set yourselves to do.

—William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art (1883)

close encounters

In poetry there is almost no distinction between the real and the paranormal.

box of drafts

Do you have a book of poems?, he asked. No, I said, but I have good sized boxful of them.

usual suspects

Like police captains with few leads, translators seem to put out the call to round up the usual suspects, rather than search for a less trafficked in poetry.

sentiment for thanksgiving

The People Are a Temple

And souls are candles, each lighting the other.

—Gennady Aygi (1934-2008)

[Translation from the Russian by Peter France.]

fanning themselves

It was warm in the café, and the poets waiting for their turn to read were fanning themselves with their thin volumes.

poet world

Poet in the world, poet for the world, poet of the world, poet with the world, poet and the world, poet against the world, an uneasy navigation.

taken by surprise

[229]

Lyric embodies the desire to mean perfectly.

It takes language by surprise. (For this to be possible, there must be a general situation or condition of language which is not lyric.)

—Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (U. of Toronto Press, 1992)

[New edition of Lyric Philosophy]

everlastingly provisional

The word ‘poetry’ will always be subject to a working definition.

strongly worded

Diction is the muscle fiber of a poetic line.

source and target

After he’d read his poems, someone in the audience asked from what language the poems had been translated.

was like

A past-tense pastoral.