beyond print

It should be a source of pride to have written a good number of absolutely unpublishable poems.

command performance

A poet who was too much the impresario inside his own poetry.

uncredited character

He had a walk-on part in the literary movement.

uncommonplace

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

—Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel à l'ordre (1926)

new cliché

Compel, don’t tell.

poem before the poem

The ‘proto-poem’—the poem composed only in the mind—will always be much better than the poem.

bridges in space

The lines were bridges over
the emptiness on each side.

see it slant

Before you can ‘tell it slant’ you must first see it at an angle.

controlling interest

A poet whose inclination was to control the material and not to discover what was withheld from him in the material.

but only a little

The Cistercian monk Gilbert of Hoyland (d. 1172) insightfully wrote, “We have to pass beyond human experience but only a little to experience union with God. The divine majesty immeasurably transcends every creature, yet it is as if the divine majesty is close and familiar.” This “only a little” is Emily Dickinson’s impetus and the abiding conviction embodied in all her poetry.

—Charles M. Murphy, Mystical Prayer: The Poetic Example of Emily Dickinson (Liturgical Press, 2019)

have you no shame

Apparently poets don’t embarrass easily.

first and last art

His art never shifted or changed in any significant way. He continued to produce variations of his original vision.

turbulence ahead

Like any flowing substance language is subject to turbulence.

new evaporate

Even if one’s work is new and original, one must ask whether it escapes the ephemeral.

triumph of content

The container never greater than what’s contained: If you think form over content, your poem will fail.

will be written

That city [Tiflis] with all the people I saw in it and with all the things I had gone to experience and all the things I had brought with me will be the same to me as Chopin, Scriabin, Marburg, Venice and Rilke have been, one of the chapters of my Safe Conduct, which goes on all through my life, one of the chapters which, as you know, are not numerous; one of these chapters, and it will be the next one written. I say ‘will be’ because I am a writer, and all this has to be written down and an expression found for it all; I say ‘will be’ because so far as I am concerned it has already become a fact.

—Boris Pasternak, letter to Titian and Nina Tabidze, 13 December 1931, Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

--
I do not write poems. Like a novel, they write
Me, and the course of life accompanies them.

Titian Tabidze (Georgian poet, 1895-1937), died in Stalin's purge of 1937.

too faraway

He wrote the poems that came to him, but never wrote the poems which were only dimly seen.

wide bodies

 I know I’ve grown old, because on my bookshelves I’ve replaced many of poets’ thin volumes with their Collected and Complete poems. 

blameless

 Never blame the language for the poem you could not realize.

straight talk

 The message to the workshop should be: No one is fucking around in here.

make a verse of

Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make A Verse Of (Simon and Schuster, 1961)

I found reference to this book on the site Neglected Books. Intrigued by the description, I bought a used copy (second printing) online. Helen Bevington was an associate professor of English at Duke University, teaching alongside her husband, Merle Bevington, whom she affectionately refers to as “B.” The book is a series of brief encounters with books, with authors, about the people she’d met and places visited.

After many of the vignettes she offers a poem, hence the title, …Make A Verse Of.  Her poetry is accomplished but clearly out of synch with post WW II late-modernism of her times. Her gift is light verse, wry verse, and touching sentiment never lapsing into banal sentimentality. He poetry appeared in many leading periodicals like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

She is scholarly but with an easy erudition and the ability to disclose what may have been overlooked. Helen Bevington is a genial guide through the literary byways of Robert Herrick, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, Madame de Sévigné, and many other literary figures.

A couple of samples:

The Poet as Singer

    We complain today that the poets no longer sing. They talk to themselves in the low conversational tones, expecting to be overheard. (Marchbanks says, in [G. B. Shaw’s] Candida, “That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.”) Sir Herbert Read even urges poets not to be audible, but to keep private and remain unheard: “Never lift your voice—modern poetry has an inaudible wavelength.”

   Yet in a golden age, Pindar and Sappho sang. The Elizabethans were lyric poets in the true sense: “to be sung to the lyre.” Campion’s lyre was a real one; it was a lute. I have no idea whether he wrote the poems first and afterward set them to music, or whether he added the words to existing songs. It may have made no difference to him which came first. His words and notes, he said, were coupled “lovingly together.”

   Unlike our modern poets, Campion remembered that, if a song is to be heard, he must trust the rest of us to become singers, too:

               All the songs are mine, if you express them well,

               Otherwise they are your own, Farewell. 

[91]

=

The Wisdom of William Morris

   When I look at my own house, I think wistfully of the good sense that William Morris would teach me. He once said (in a lecture on “The Beauty of Life”),

    “…if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

   I choose to believe that the advice rules out most gadgets. It meets Thoreau halfway in the matter of simplicity. It echoes the Greeks, whose possessions had both utility and grace. It mixes, as Horace said, the utile with the dulce.

   Where, then, is the time and skill for the acquiring of beautiful saucepans, or of stirrings spoons to stir the soul?

[139]

religious perpetuation

Creative writing teachers who go on repeating the same pieties they’d learned when they were students.

post-facto poetics

So as not to have to defend his poetry, G. M. Hopkins discovered he must invent his poetics (instress; inscape).

write clumsily

A saving grace and a disturbing handicap it is to speak from the top of your head, putting all trust in yourself as a truthsayer. I write from the top of my head and to write so means to write honestly, but it almost means to write clumsily. No poet likes to be clumsy. But I decided to heck with it, as long as it allows me to speak the truth.

—Gregory Corso, “Some of My Beginning … And What I Feel Right Now,” Exiled Angel: A Study of the Work of Gregory Corso, ed. Gregory Stephenson (London: Hearing Eye, 1989), 87.

not again

Except in a poem’s refrain, poets should fear repeating themselves.

that year to remember

You only need that one annus mirabilis.

phrase wary

Question all common expressions as they come to mind (e.g., come to mind). One must make certain they are the best way of saying what needs to be said.

sing singular

The dream of writing a poem without a hint or an echo of another poem.

hardened mold

A hardshell formalist.

now new

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

—David Hockney, interview with Mark Feeney, "David Hockney keeps seeking new avenues of exploration," Boston Globe (26 February 2006)

the poem

I’m more interested in the poem than the book of poems.

stick figures

The alphabet: Those stick figures signaling us toward sound, then speech.

things and whatnot

Junk drawer poem: Lots in there, but nothing useful or worth much.

typos r us

I never criticize typos. Because I’ve never seen a typo any worse than the ones I’ve committed.

too good for us

The honest editor sent a nice note rejecting my poem, stating that I must place it in a more prestigious journal, for the pages of his magazine would only drag the piece down.

repulsive and extreme

…I am convinced that for a poet to be great we must find ourselves repelled by some part of this poet’s work. Not just mildly disquieted, but actively repelled. So Marianne Moore is repulsive, extreme, in scrupulosity. (The great critic Randall Jarrell, in trying to describe what about Marianne Moore’s poetry put readers off, listed “her extraordinary discrimination, precision and restraint, the odd propriety of her imagination.” He adored her work, by the way.) There has got to be a fanaticism—it doesn’t matter, it can be the fanaticism of fastidiousness—but there has got to be some private path the reader just can’t follow all the way. There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.

—Kay Ryan, “Inedible Melon,” Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020), 142.

many sided

Great poetry affords many perspectives.

wrong, wrong again

Remember, both the writer and the publisher could be wrong about the work’s worth.

desert trek

An arid read: Page after page yielding few quotable lines.

there, there, you'll be fine

Some books need those little pats on the back that blurbs give.

not human

Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see operating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying power (we are not exhausted by it and must always revisit it).

—Kay Ryan, “A Consideration of Poetry,” Synthesizing Gravity (Grove Press, 2020)

[I don't believe this a bit. But I must acknowledge other views re poetry.]

shape-shifting wrestlers

The poem as the mat where language and the psyche twist and grapple.

ultimate enemy of promise

When a clearly gifted poet dies young, of course we miss out on the even greater poetry to come; then again, the quality of the poetry won’t ever slide or fail to exceed the fine early work.

feeling it

Critic, never be too smart to feel.

need for speed

A poem that can only be read headlong, without a backward look.

non-event

Sometimes a good occasional poem comes from an event the poet would otherwise have ignored.

original gift

...I think some intensity of awareness must be lost, since it depends on contrast. And that intensity is impoverishment's aftermath, and blessing: what succeeds temporary darkness, what succeeds the void or the desert, is not the primary gift of the world but the essential secondary gift of knowledge, a sense of the significance of the original gift, the scale of our privilege.

—Louise Glück, “On Impoverishment,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

feel it

Enjambment: There is no rule other than feel.

feel this

Art on that borderline of kitsch: Are you not a feeling human being? Are you not a thinking human being?

declined to tell us

He had opinions on all matters related to literary works, but demurred when it came to making a statement about his own work.

not today

Today all I could do is stare into my notbook [sic].

of im and in

The reviewer is concerned with impressions, the critic with insights.

words you don't know yet

Many said [in the publishing world] that it was not a children's book. The vocabulary was much too difficult...

"But my feeling was that there is no such thing as a difficult word. There are only words you don't know yet,..."

—Norton Juster, quoted in his obit by Andrew Limbong

parts of its sum

A long poem known solely in passages and by the sense of its whole.

veil of artifice

A formalist who hides his lack of poetic verve behind a scrim of crafted verse. He doesn’t have the nerve to leave the verse behind.

slovenly housekeeping

Dishes piled in the sink, an ashtray overstuffed with butts, clothes lying about the floor, a beer can having rolled under the bed, this was both his life and his poetics.

back to even

The poet sold just enough books after the reading to pay for the gas to get there (and back).

no to wordsworth

Poetry should be emotion recollected in emotion.

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007)

artist books

I love looking at them: artist books. Some can't be handled, which I find annoying. Most are collector's items or museum pieces. Seems a sad fate for the text therein.

known by association

The poet denied he was part of that group/school/movement, when the only reason anyone knew his work was because of that association.

room for more

Poems are creatures we put into the world to respond to us, and to whom we, in turn, respond. And marvelously there’s always room for more.

—Irving Feldman, Usable Truths (Waywiser Press, 2019)

wish, wait, will

Some wish for the poem, some wait for the poem, some will the poem.

time spent

On the side of critics, often good criticism takes much longer than the original composition.

selection is criticism

Even organizing a reading series is a critical act.

foam and sand

Every month Poetry magazine arrives in the mail and I think of waves on a beach, a wash of white foam dissipating into the sand.

anthology is

Anthology: text zoo.

nature and artifice

A vapour trail cuts across and above some untidy clouds, across the blue, before and after the clouds, as I look up through trees blown by a strong wind. A Gestalt centering on that intimate mixture of nature and artifice. A poem—perhaps.

—Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art: A Poetry Note-Book (Allision & Busby, 1982)

blurbs get behind me

The poet was pleased her reputation had risen to the point she was no longer obliged to gather blurbs.

reading time

Was I a slow reader or did poetry just reveal itself slowly?

running behind

You can’t make up lost ground in the poem by adding more words.

muchly more

It’s always a bad sign when you hear a writer being praised for being ‘prolific'.

prepare to read

One must make ready for an encounter with poetry.

ultimate funny

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.

—James Tate, The Paris Review (Issue 177, Summer 2006) interview by Charles Simic.

[New website honoring James Tate.]

stealth poems

There are many songs that poets don’t recognize as true poems.

compressed composition

He found that he could only force poems to happen. And the shorter the time to write the poem, the better.