like air

reading is often a big help
but wherever you turn
you are surrounded by language
like the air

—John James, “A Theory of Poetry,” Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-1991 (Macmillan Academic and Professional, Ltd, 1992) edited by Denise Riley

introduce and give insight

Critics can introduce us to poems we may have overlooked and they can give us insights into those we’ve read but have only dimly entered the mind's aperture.

locked and blocked

The lines of the poem threatening to rotate over, becoming prison bars.

flipped the script

In a book of poems by a known language poet I ran into a series of pages printed upside down. I thought at first it was a ‘dada’ move, but then looking at the page numbers it was clearly a printing error.

attractive sentences

Attracted by a good sentence, it was hard for her to enjoy lines broken into single words and disconnected phrases and clauses.

lyric poets

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”
He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets
Usually have—he knew it—cold hearts.
It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art
Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

—Czeslaw Milosz, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Second Space (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2005), translation by Robert Hass

in junger times

Not as ‘Jung’ as I once was, I find I’m less interested in archetypes and symbols.

splits cracks voids

A poet notices the interstices.

meaning material

Words are material but of a different order from paint or from musical notes (neither of which carry meaning).

living lit

Literature is the ultimate living document.

low alert

Poet, be alert to what others ignore.

either-and-or

[M]y choice of poetry had to do with the fact that it more nearly answered to my own mental tendencies. Whereas scholarship, even in its often impenetrable post-modernist avatars, still ultimately depends upon premise and conclusion, upon the dialectical approach, the realm of lyric poetry—at least for me—is roughly described by Carl Jung when he speaks of true psychology as the domain “always…of either-and-or.” That is, lyric can keep multiple perspectives alive within one frame without seeming merely to be a muddle.

—Sydney Lea, “Why Poetry?,” Seen From All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life (Green Writers Press, 2021)

dwindling supplies

A poet who could legitimately fear running out of words.

free to be poet

Poets with independent means most enjoy the profession of poet.

finding or writing

I saw a workshop advert entitled 'Writing Erasure Poetry'.

space it takes to tell

A sonnet that was a compressed short story.

summary execution

The poet shot the common reader with the first line and then carried on.

attracted to ellipsis

What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. … It eems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

—Louise Glück, "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Proofs & Theories

doomed definition

Any definition of art or poetry is doomed from the start, though perhaps while composing the definition some good thinking gets done.

weight being

Poet, make the first line weight-bearing like a lintel over the pillars of the margins.

last word

Voices die away. It's the poetry that continues. Hold forth as long as you can, but the written words, recorded words, the remembered words, those will be sustained or not.

[Written in response to a fellow who overvalued poetry readings.]

entire and eternal

Reading the book in its entirety led you to feel you’d be reading it for an eternity.

necessary condition

If I was to be the ‘common reader’, I had a lot of reading to do.

invisible web

Though written in discrete parallel lines the poem is a web of connections.

life elevated

Art is an experience that arouses us beyond what our day-to-day offers.

ordinary uncommon

The writer's problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the other to give reality.

—Thomas Hardy, Notebooks (1881)

library paradox

When I had fewer books I read more. Or maybe I read the books I had better.

don't stay too long

The writer welcomed the interviewer into his office, but the guest chair offered turned out to be quite uncomfortable.

pierced consciousness

The first line went in like a hypodermic needle, quick with a faint twinge.

no mail

The epistolary poem was marked ‘Return to Sender’.

literary lineage

A critic who could take any new poet and show the links to all her/his literary lineage.

roots with dirt

These days
whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

    just to make clear
    where they come from.

—Charles Olson

[Quoted in Dale Smith's essay re "Slow Poetry."]

go big or

Sorry, but if you’re not a romantic poet, in time people will pay less attention.

fire-breather

A political poet whose mouth was like a flamethrower: He had the sympathetic audience leaning back in their seats to avoid being singed.

tough slog

The experience of reading a long poem is enhanced merely by one’s sense of accomplishment.

word wait

The poet had waited a long time to use that particular word in a poem.

time running out

He kept waiting for that one great run of poems.

describe then design

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.

—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford U. Press, 1977), by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein.

real struggle

The imagination as nemesis.

other utterance

First line: announce something other.

beyond the book

Books often don’t go on, but certain poems do persist in the public consciousness.

remains airborne

A poem that somehow remained airborne in the zeitgeist.

unsteady reading

The lectern was wobbly…the poems read even shakier.

one stroke

It is better to paint a good unfinished
picture than a poor completed
one. Many believe that a picture
is finished when they have
worked in as many details as possible.
—One stroke can be a completed
work of art.

—Edvard Munch, The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We are Flames which Pour Out of the Earth (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2005) edited and translated by J. Gill Holland

rescued and restored

Found on an acknowledgments page: The poem “Title Here” was published in an ill-advised version, based on an editor’s suggestions, in Lit Magazine. The poem has been restored to its original state in this volume.

the nothing that is

Nothing is what those without content write about.

amherst amethyst

Emily Dickinson: Her mind outshone her life.

written in sand

The poet thought he held his new poetry book in his hands, but as he read it turned into a handful of sand running through his fingers.

eyes glazed over

The scholar, after spending many hours annotating the text, was glossy-eyed.

clear or turbid

Porson: Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are: the turbid look most profound.

—Walter Savage Landor, “Porson and Southey,” Imaginary Conversations (1882)

fast or facile

Poet, be aware when words come too easily.

not unless

The editor said he’d publish my poem if I would agree to strike the last line. I replied that I’d let him publish my poem that way if he’d legally change his name to Notable Dolt.

constant threat

A poem that threatened line by line to turn into a different genre.

passage lodged

We call them ‘passages’ in literature yet some lodge themselves inside of us for the remainder of our lives.

vision not recognition

The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a 'vision' of this object rather than mere 'recognition'.

—Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), trans. by Benjamin Sher.

fixed and unfixed

Poem as a dynamic array of words

bad map

We can’t expect the poem to be a guidebook, think of it as more like a badly drawn map.

noun's act

Are not some verbs merely the familiar actions of nouns?

hold firm

I’d rather write a poem that remains important to me, than make a change that feels inauthentic.

shove over

Don’t worry how the poem will sit with the audience.

critical compliment

Miss Moore has great limitations—her work is one long triumph of them; but it was sad, for so many years, to see them and nothing else insisted upon, and Miss Moore neglected for poets who ought not to be allowed to throw elegies in her grave.

Randall Jarrell on Marianne Moore, Poetry and the Age (1953).

Above quote encountered in Viscous Nonsense: Quips, Snubs and Jabs by Literary Friends and Foes (Princeton Architectural Press, 2021) edited by Kristen Hewitt.

absorbing all opinion

The long idiolectic poem that many poets claimed to know, confident that nothing they would say about the poem could be contradicted by evidence from the text.

close reading

Close reading: Trying to be in the room where the poem happened.

longer and harder

Avant-garde poets try to outdo one another in writing the longest and least engageable poem.

[After reading a review of Nate Mackey’s 976 page book.]

distinct and uncertain

Poems are often like voices carrying over water, both distinct and uncertain when heard.

no kink

I hung about town the whole month of June because of the introduction I was writing to my Shakespeare translations. I was terribly afraid to get stuck in the muddle of pseudo-scholarly verbosity which every great centuries-old theme gathers round it and of only adding to this tangled skein a kind of modified kink. Imagine, it did not happen! I succeeded in saying in very simple and comprehensible words a great deal about Shakespeare that I learned when I was translating him, and all this on one printer’s sheet!

—Boris Pasternak, in a letter to S. I Chikovani, 15 March 1946
Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

saved you from the poem

Be thankful the editor had the good sense to not publish your poem.

make it sing

Poet, take pains to make it sing.

loose talk

Literature: loose talk transcribed.

breathe the world in

Colette was a lifewatcher. To look she used all her senses at once—she heard, she touched, she breathed the world in, she stared with intense care, fixedly, like a cat, hypnotized.

Regardé, the last word Colette uttered before she died, was her living word for l’amour, la vie, le monde.

—Helen Bevington, “Colette and the Word Regardé” Beautiful Lofty People (Harcourt Brace, 1974))

wow and yes

Nothing better than a last line that is both unexpected and inevitable.

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)