fail better

There are failed poems that should be published in the state in which they were abandoned. Many a tidy and finished poem shouldn’t stand to be published shoulder to shoulder with a glorious mess.

two ways

[From 1996 interview with Ralph Adamo and John Biguenet published in the New Orleans Review]

Allen Ginsberg and I used argue about aesthetics a lot. Every week he had a new idea. Usually hopelessly wrong. One time we were talking about spontaneous poetry, and he said, “Well, you believe what I believe, which is that an artist is a person who makes things.” He doesn’t submit to voices speaking, I said. You hear voices thinking, you write it down, but I am in charge of the poem. You might let the horse run for a while , but you tell it which direction to go, because if you don’t , the horse will eat all day. I believe in the horse. I believe in listening to the horse, but I’m riding the horse. And Allen said, “You’re afraid to release your poetry from your control. You're afraid, let me see,” he said. “Write some poems that way.” So I wrote some poems that way. They’re in my first book. They are the only two poems in the book that I wish weren’t there. If I ever do a selected poems, those two poems certainly won’t be there.

Jack Gilbert, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), edited by Mark Yakich and John Biguenet, p. 205.

toss up

The judge said of the poetry books: All are equally good, and each indistinguishable from the other.

profound sip

A poem should be a tincture of the universe.

alt usage

If it’s poetry you want to write
You must pitch your Strunk & White.

squeal at the turn

You could hear the tires squeal at the turn of a line.

words aren't precious

I began to experiment with Japanese forms, particularly the tanka and the renga, because their psychological structures are alien to me and force me to work without my familiar tools, my little linguistic reflexes and logical assumptions. It’s fun to keep throwing away those familiar responses, which amount to the old way of working, and to try to do something that makes me feel like a beginner again. It’s like finger-painting—I can make lots of fast, trivial messes and crumple the cheap, ephemeral paper. Gone! No important! And every once in a while I really surprise myself, and write something that suddenly throws light on the mystery. In order to do this, I’ve had to make some rules for myself. One: don’t save drafts. I used to cling to all the false starts and apparent dead ends in case some gem might be embedded there. I still believe that the unconscious knows valuable things that I don’t, but most of what it knows is useless stuff. Two: if a line isn’t working, start again from scratch. Words aren’t precious. If I lose a promising trail, so what? Unless I’m willing to lose it, how can I get to the next one, and the next? I think I used to stop far too soon, letting whatever happened to be there on the page command my attention, instead of asking myself what could be there in its place. What is this myopia but a reflection of my self, which likes to fix broken things and which would rather not think painful, self-annihilating thoughts? Thus the third rule: there’s only one question—what is the self? Until it’s answered, keep asking it. Then, who knows?

—Chase Twichell, “To Throw Away,” Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems (Middlebury College Press, 1997), Robert Pack and Jay Parini, editors.

new species

A poem that was unfamiliar as such.

word fortress

Poet, write a stanza that stands as a word fortress.

confident line

Poet, write a line that never looks back.

get what you pay for

Most poetry events are free, so organizers can’t give a money-back guaranty.

mainly blah

The mainstream could throw up a thousand books a year just as good as this one and just as undistinguished.

solitary business

The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse....  One year before Baudelaire wrote "Le Vin des chiffonniers," he published a prose description of the figure: "Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful and gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess Industry." This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move about the same way.

—Walter Benjamin,  Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940 (Belnap Press, 1996), p. 48., Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, editors

deep space

Why are we so amazed by how poems are formed when the universe holds similar mysteries.

[South Pole Wall]

more in the prose

Her prose sketch of how the poem was written was more interesting than the poem itself.

one or undone

A line of poetry should have integrity or else it should unravel extravagantly.

not blocked enough

After reading a book with two-thirds too many pages of poetry, I wished that more poets complained of ‘publication block’.

fixedly

In the precise particular the peculiar hides.

gauged by language

If a poet writes about nothing, his language better really be something.

not the least of it

Most of what you’ve written has never been published; that’s as it should be.

it can fly

Frank Gallo, author of Birding in Connecticut:

“Note the plain face of the female House Finch as compared to boldly patterned face of the female Purple Finch which shows a distinct white eyebrow and wide black eyeline. As with the male, the female House Finch has a longer tail, is buffy below, and has a curved culmen (upper beak) versus the short-forked tail, whiter belly, and straight culmen of the female Purple Finch.”

Sometimes the talk of birders reminds me of the distinctions made by poetry critics. ‘But the thing can fly,’ I want to say.

not yet adult

His juvenilia was more like ‘adolescencia’.

don't be that guy

After the poetry reading he asks the poet to sign his book with an obvious remainder mark.

handed a parachute

Here’s your parachute, Poet, wonderful as the charms of the chasm.

Vincente Huidobro, Preface to “Altazor,” trans. by Eliot Weinberger, Pinpoints in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), selected by Raúl Zurita and edited by Forrest Gander.

lewd or lame

Limericks are either lewd or lame.

drop dead backdrop

I swear if an author were brought before a firing squad the background would be shelves of books.

linear sense

You write word strings. A poet writes lines.

need to know, paid to know

He knew more about poetry than anyone who wasn’t getting paid to be in the know.

repeat and change

According to the critic Bob Thompson, one of the criteria of Yoruba art and sculpture is “repetition of changes.” This is significant to “For Our People” as well, for the poem does not repeat monotonously but moves unexpectedly, piling on moments and incidents authentic and sensitive to the Black experience, gathering momentum until it reaches a crescendo.

—Angela Jackson commenting on her poem “For Our People” in The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019) edited by Elise Paschen.

epigram

His favorite artist is KAWS,
doesn’t that say it all?

particle poem

A poem in which almost nothing happens: a glance, a gesture, a lilt, particle of a larger world.

tell it

Necessarily the times had shifted poetry toward rhetoric.

pamphlets, chapbooks, books

Remember that your words don’t create a recycling problem until they’re physically printed.

can you hear me

Poets in those times were too busy giving readings. In fact most of the poetry they’d ‘read’ was what they’d heard at readings.

general or particular

What has reasoning to do with Art or Painting?

The difference between a bad Artist and a Good One Is: The Bad Artist Seems to copy a Great deal. The Good One Really does copy a Great deal.

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is Alone Distinction of Merit.

—William Blake, annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses.

--

From May to September, 1809, Blake held an exhibition of his works at the house of his brother James on Broad Street. He had advertised it with the motto, “Fit audience find tho’ few.” The catalogue was included in the half-crown admission. This exhibition was Blake’s “one great effort to secure recognition as a representative of imaginative art,” and it ended in comparative failure.

Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX Century (Pantheon Books, 1945), edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves

empty space

As he was reading he found that his eyes drifted to the blank spaces.

head above

As it turned out the title was too good for this poem.

two ways to get there

A poetry of method, a poetry of material.

bi-directional imagination

Memory calls up experience in an imaginative act, while fantasy carries forth experience in an imaginative act.

no audience

Still waiting for that single Klieg to step into.

handwriting

And what else is handwriting but the concentrated expression of the personality of the individual? Of all the sciences or pseudo-sciences which presume to interpret the character and destiny of man from signs, graphology is surely the one which has the soundest foundation. Handwriting is taught, and certain of its characteristics belong to the general style of the period, but the personality of the writer, if it is at all relevant, does not fail to pierce through. The same happens with art. The lesser artists show the elements common to the period in a more conspicuous manner, but no artist, no matter how original, can avoid reflecting a number of traits. In terms of handwriting one can speak of a ductus, or hand, or style of writing not only in actual handwriting, but in every form of artistic creation, which is to an even greater extent an expression, something pressed or squeezed out of the individual.

—Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton U. Press, 1974)

come round again

I must reread poetry because poetry always has more to reveal.

high standard

I ask only to write a poem like Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

single-use product

One of those ‘exercise poems’ that should be marked ‘Please dispose of properly after use’.

stilted speech

Syllabics often make the language sound unnatural, for good or for bad.

manners or mischief

A poetry of manners, a poetry of mischief.

radar screen

It is an accuracy of vision, an account of now, an account of memory or a vision, an account of a dream, of a fiction totally imagined, described, accurately and exactly to our best ability beyond misstatement, beyond misshaping any shape of our idea. In our practice as poets, to be inaccurate becomes a real Lie. All our attention is on the page. We cannot account for the hours spent—we have only the page. A radar screen watcher works a high vigilance profession. Our attention is so intense that it is a vigilance, too.

—Laura Jensen, “Lessons in Form,” Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Wayne Stat U. Press, 1990), edited by James McCorkle

sum of its parts

A great first line and a fine ending, with all the chutes & ladders lines in between.

poem place

A good poem dwells in the mouth while making a home in the mind.

read to be or not to be

You have to read a lot of poetry in order to know what kind of poet you want to be...and what kind you don’t.

obscure worlds

As print litmags, always obscure, fade into archives, the online litmags blot out cyberspace.

missteps are steps

A poem that flaunted its flaws, knowing they were necessary to the whole.

eye poet

   In Miss Moore’s time…the poet found it indispensable to work directly with the printed page, which is where, and only where, his cats and trees exist.…We may say that this became possible when poets began to use typewriters. And we may note that Miss Moore has been in her lifetime: a librarian; an editor; and a teacher of typewriting: locating fragments already printed; picking and choosing; making, letter by letter, neat pages.
   Her poems are not for voice; she senses this herself reading them badly; in response to a question, she once said that she wrote them for people to look at….Moore’s cats, her fish, her pangolins and ostriches exist on the page in tension between the mechanisms of print and the presence of a person behind those mechanisms.

—Hugh Kenner, “The Experience of the Eye: Marianne Moore’s Tradition,” Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism (David McKay Co., 1970), edited by Jerome Mazzaro.

for whom the taco bell tolls

I don’t have enough time ahead of me on earth to read TBQ.

undo influence

Certain poets let their keen interests—be it Zen, Marxism, bird-watching, etc.—infuse their verse, and the poems suffer the influence.

eyes open and aware

Turn a line of poetry as you would turn a corner in a part of the town you don’t know.

fiction enough

By and large, poets believe the world is fiction enough. (Maybe Wallace Stevens said that already.)

stamp collecting

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
—Ernest Rutherford

All poetry is either lyric or stamp collecting.

short and sweet

It’s easier to judge longer poems. Short poems are more difficult to rank for merit.

unwieldy lines

Though written in level and even lines, unwieldy was what he was going for.

authoritative line

[One point from a list of 14 principles of composition, which he prefaces by saying, "I honestly do not know how consistent I am in using principles of composition. Certainly the compromise between eye and ear is not always the same kind of compromise. Every poem makes its own peculiar demands. Still, I will try to list a few principles by which I generally work."]

11. Don’t explain away a line which has an authority of its own, even if the line may puzzle the intellect—i.e., don’t write for people more interested in understanding a poem than experiencing it. This is not the same as being willfully difficult or obscure, which is merely tiresome.

—Peter Klappert, in “O’Connor The Bad Traveler,” Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (Longman, 1977), edited by Alberta T. Turner

why is your face familiar

The character actor and the major poet were both trying to get recognized in the local bar. The character actor won.

back to basics

Stayed home, sewed his own clothes, wrote poems.

staid style

That staid style that shows too much conscious control over the material.

insignia

To say this poem stands for me.

worth glory

All art is religious in a sense that no artist would work unless he believed that there was something in life worth glorifying. This is what art is about.

—Henry Moore, Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (U. of California, 2002), Alan Wilkinson, editor.

resource management

A poet prone to waste a lot of white space.

holding on

Books for some of us are handholds over the abyss.

tooth and nail

An artist and a writer lived together harmoniously while their books and artwork battled for every inch of wall space.

bio overblown

One of those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink bios trying too hard to impress.

poetry got small

Like the character Norma Desmond from the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, she was the kind of poet you could imagine responding to an interviewer who'd suggested her reputation had faded, with the line: “I am big. It’s poetry that got small.”

this is the world

Jean Cocteau said mystery exists only in precise things—people in their situations, situations in people. Because I believe the visionary life has nothing to do with a necessarily transcendent existence, I like most of the poetry I read. I believe most poets know this is the world; and when you try to lead a special life or write a special poetry, you are dancing with an imaginary partner at a meaningless dance to which you have invited yourself and no one else.

—Frank Stanford, “With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes,” Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (Longman, 1977), edited by Alberta T. Turner

thousands of lines of me

Its critical rhetoric couched in politics and theory, language poetry was perhaps the most self-indulgent of all poetry movements.

product placement

There were so many brand names popping up in her poetry, I was certain she’d struck some product placement deals before publication.

carrying poetry

Many of us carry a few touchstone poems. Perhaps some of us live by a handful of poems.