quiet please

Silence is too important and shouldn’t be interrupted with trivial sounds.

degree of difficulty

The poem was difficult in all the right ways.

catbird seat

A critic secure being only a critic.

some experience required

Thus the specific beauties of a poem may easily be lost to an unimaginative mind, as all the values of English poetry might so easily be lost to a world where men, intent upon their own active business, should come at last to employ “business English” as their sole linguistic medium, a medium more completely foreign to the language of Shelley or of Shakespeare than theirs to that of Catullus or of Homer. The beauties of poetry would still be those identical beauties, but these beauties would simply not occur to readers of the poets, were there any readers left, as upon the syllables and lines before them. And if these beauties remain what they are in essence, that is of little interest to a world in which they are effectively prevented from occurring. For they can not appear upon the face of experience even when men concern themselves to look upon the lines that could alone evoke them, unless men’s minds already hold the sensuous elements they would summon, and are capable of the imaginative response though which they must be recreated. If linguistic lore and stores of manuscripts and printed books may plausibly be said to preserve poetry itself, its beauties, even of sensuous imagery, can not so be kept in human experience. For their occurrence, minds are needed stored with the images that contemplation has engraved upon them, endowed with all the powers of imagination for reviving them as the poetry specifies, and as we shall further see, with all the possibilities of feeling and emotion that their beauties must also externalize, if they are to occur in their full intended character.

—D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1929)

two kinds of new

An avant-garde that just is or an avant-garde that exists only as against tradition

multiply simply

The poem was simple in a thousand ways.

grown thoughtful

Older poets are prone to meditations.

not this, not that...

If a poet flips through his/her book at a reading, that’s probably a bad sign. Shouldn’t almost any poem one turns to in the book be worth reading aloud?

fortifications and formations

There are forms that are castles and those that are hordes.

flying into himself

One quirk of his [Bill Knott's], which I saw several times, was what I called his "defensive rudeness." For example, someone would approach him and say something like, "I loved your book." And Bill would say, "Then you must have terrible taste in poetry." And turn on his heel, and walk away. In another situation, he replied to the same kind of comment with, "Uh, I'm not from around here, umm, umm, I don't know the streets," and turned away. Needless to say, the people on the other end of this kind of exchange looked as if they were slapped in the face. I remember berating him about this, a few times, and his response was a shrug. He simply did not know how to respond to anything positive.

[...]

In June 2015, Robert Fanning; Leigh Jajuga, a friend of Bill's and an assistant in his last years; Star Black, the poet and photographer, and a friend of Bill's; and I, buried Bill's ashes in Carson City, MI, his hometown. Robert had a small stone made. It says: "William Knott 1940-2014 / I Am Flying into Myself." The line is from a poem called "Death" in his first book:

      Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
      They will place my hands like this.
      It will look as though I am flying into myself.

—Tom Lux, "Bill Knott: Can My Voice Save My Throat," Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), edited by Steven Huff.

[Note: The poet Tom Lux passed away shortly after he edited Bill Knott's posthumous selected poems, I Am Flying Into Myself (FSG, 2017).]

style points

Style is the inevitable verbal residue of a significant writer. Real style cannot be shared or mimicked, it being the unique markings of that one writer.

clearly sealed

A book of poems found in its original shrink wrap.

escape poem

Who knows what poem will escape into the world and be known?

five beats is all

Blank verse can make you believe in any line.

price paid

The one price you pay for poetry is attention.

-+-

If you believe, as I do, that poetry is a part of the world's work—a human need—you don't feel time spent on poetry is idle. Poetry's not a luxury but a deep and permanent part of language making.

—Mary Ponsot, Knopf's Question-a-Poet Contest (April 2000)

stuck here & there

After the critic got finished with the poem it was a pincushion of far-fetched associations.

opposite directions

It was one of those I-go-this-way-you-go-that-way poems.

pleasant company excluded

Don’t be that poet who writes only to please.

difficult and rare

But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

—Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

stacked and racked

It was a poetry book with a high body count.

say it

Poet, be courageous in your rhetoric.

metaphorge

The kind of metaphor that seems to forge its connection before one's eyes.

caged singers

The critic had fabricated some elaborate birdcages for his favorite singers.

going there

A poet doesn’t know what’s ineffable.

poems distilled

15
Memory is the purest form of imagination.
(Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”)

45

Anyone can be a gun, but it takes a poet to go off half-cocked.
(Dickinson, 768)

169

Finding a poem in a blank page is like finding a snowman in flakes still falling from the sky.
(Stevens, “The Snow Man”)

321

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.
(Ginsberg, “Howl”)

454

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

(L. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again")

464

Sometimes we have to die many times to figure out how we want to live.
(Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)

—George Murray, Quick (ECW Press, 2017)

no contest

Don’t tell me about your petty prizes. I want to read your incontestable poem.

too much

The poem was perfumed music.

essence of

Squeeze a parable and get a proverb.

deep meaning

A poem that was smart all the way down to the level of etymology.

poet's lot

His therapist assured him that being an unknown poet was not something to be ashamed of.

contemporaneity

George Steiner often insists that the concept of “contemporaneity” should be taken into serious consideration. For instance, it is crucial to know that Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire lived at the exact same time in order to understand the deep relevance of one’s work to the other’s. Manet’s fascination with eroticism and modernity coexisted with a more classical touch, which was rooted in a long tradition of painting. In that sense, when his oeuvre was presented in 2011 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, naming him the “man who invented modernity,” such a claim could only be accurate if related to the perpetuation of certain traditions. Modernity exists alongside tradition. And Baudelaire stands in a similar position. The literary critic Antoine Compagnon famously described his poems as “antimodern,” meaning that they were written as much in contradiction to as in close relation to modernity. Therefore, Baudelaire’s poems and Manet’s paintings, which may seem to be produced in parallel realities, indeed have a lot in common.

—Donatien Grau, The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

gnarled lines

With its many digressions, the poem tied itself up in knots.

step back

The poet talks the prose line back from the edge.

well-wrought ask

A question must be composed better than a statement.

not a transcendent act

I was going to suggest that 'This poem needs to molt its form.' Then I realized that act is not a metamorphosis.

cross purposes

When the narrative intersects with the random.

requisite equine

I put horses in poems, but I’ve never ridden one. They just seem like a good thing to put into literature.

—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Graywolf Press, 2017)

shared dream

I thought she said the poem was “dream of consciousness.”

word hose

That line was a firehose of words…

second to none

Even among anthology pieces the poem stood out.

my stalker

I once perhaps lingered too long on Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA in Creative Writing website. Since then whoever, or what bot, manages their web advertising has had an ad follow me around the web. It seems wherever I surf there is this ad featuring a comely and sincere looking creative writing teacher holding her hand up, with a slightly bent forefinger, as though she were instructing me. After a month or so, being followed around the web by her, my intended instructor, I think of her as a stalker.

affluent

Each line a tributary.

everything and nothing

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

—Walt Whitman, "Shut Not Your Doors," Leaves of Grass (1865)

backdoor left unlocked

Often the best poems one writes are those poems one backs into.

rejection note

It’s nice to see the evolution of your poetry, proving so well that you don’t believe in intelligent design.

thin as it may seem

Language is the organizing scrim that makes the world intelligible.

poem at large

Leaving a page of poetry at the bus stop or on a park bench is not littering.

deep dark line

Her lines mattered like those of an etcher.

no mouth

Readers:
Roses have no mouth,
So they address your nose with their scent.
The moon has no mouth,
So it speaks to your eyes with its light.
Then with what should a poet speak?

—Oguma Hideo, from “Talk Up a Storm,” Long, Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo, 1901-1940 (Center for Japanese Studies, The U. of Michigan, 1989)

unread and not ready

Too much speaking about poetry without due study.

solid, liquid or gas

As a solid the poem is a form, it can be held and viewed easily from all sides. In a liquid state the poem moves, flows, divides and recombines, never easy to contain. As a gas the poem is not easy to see, it rises and dissipates quickly, leaving no trace. The ideal state of a poem is liquid.

one-way street

Some failed philosophers become poets, but failed poets seldom become philosophers.

reading report

I heard the poet A.E. Stallings read today. It was the 54th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program reading. Her work was weaker than all the past readers I’ve heard (going back over a decade). She has a strong background in the Classics (Greek & Latin) but it seems wasted when it comes to her poetry. Stallings read a ‘limerick sequence’ (if you could believe someone would think writing one was a good idea) based on various mythic figures and tales…wow, that was a painful experience to hear. I did like one poem based on the Minotaur myth, wherein the Minotaur isn't slayed by Theseus, but dies trapped below earth after an earthquake has collapsed the structures above his labyrinth.

Stallings is also a translator from the Greek and Latin. I liked something she said about that. Paraphrasing her here: ‘I prefer to translate dead poets. They don’t have any opinions about or objections to your translation.’

waiting for light

Paintings stacked in a basement; poems in an unopened book.

word stock

One of the many beneficent aspects of poetry: Learning new words.

hung in space and silence

     My own notion of a poetry reading is quite different. I want the poet to talk about his poems as little as possible, and not so much about the poems as about something one step removed. The voice in which he does his talking unfortunately is the same voice the poor poems must borrow. The more we hear him the less we may be able to hear them.
     I should like poems hung, one at a time, like Japanese pictures, on the exquisite air, each poem surrounded by space and silence.

—Robert Francis, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry (U. of Massachusetts Press, 1968).

scenes from my life

Was that a book of poems or a verbal scrapbook of family vignettes?

known by heart

Without glancing at the contents page or index he cracked open the book at the very poem he wanted to read again.

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.