chop chop

This or that critic, as a way of calling a poem basic, often balks at its being “just prose chopped up into lines.” Reader, this statement may sound radical at first, but it couldn’t be more obvious. Poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. I mean this to be final, categorical, and no slight to poetry.

—Elisa Gabbert, “What Poetry Is,” The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018)

name and calling

Until someone else calls you a poet, don’t think of yourself as one.

end happens

The end of a poem happens; you can’t try to explain the end.

questioned line

Interrogate each line you write: Could it be twisted or steered away from common diction?

read it to me

It was a poem I’d rather have read to me than read myself.

what is given and withheld

Within a few lines you know what you’re going to get from the poem, and what will not be disclosed. After that, all there is to do is relax.

discouraging the biographer

Documents relating to Cavafy’s life are scarce. He seldom kept a journal, and very few of his own letters have survived. His life was rather uneventful, and his remarks on his poems are generally unhelpful, while the observations recorded in his sporadic journal entries are seldom of great interest. His poem ‘Hidden’, which he wrote in 1908 but never published, is particularly discouraging for the biographer:

   From what I did and what I said
   let them not seek to find who I was.

—Peter Mackridge, introduction to Robert Liddell’s Cavafy: A Critical Biography (Duckbacks, 1974).

least and slight

He was afraid he’d become one of those poets who could compose something from the least wisp of thought, a slight wind brushing the skin.

why read poetry

Reason #449 to read poetry: Poetry is a repository of knowledge about our world.

two peas

The avant-garde has its own formalism.

start and finish

It was a great first line because of the poem or story that followed.

small step

Poet, all those primers and guidebooks will only take you so far.

sit down and grind

E. A. Robinson: “I don’t have trances, furors or ecstasies. My poetic spells are of the most prosaic sort. I just sit down and grind it out and use a trifle more tobacco than is good for me.”

Quoted in Geoffrey Grigson's The Private Art: A Poetry Note-Book (Allision & Busby, 1982), in the section “Fish Crows and nightingales,” 103.

to stem the tide

Day after day, I will write the same poem in the sand, allowing the tide to erase it. Until I get it right, and then even the tide dare not touch it.

equations

Like: =; as: ≃.

talking to oneself

Some poets eventually talk on and on to themselves.

[Thinking of Ammons’ late books.]

content control

Content is revised by selection and highlight.

annotated copy

How does one make so many thoughtful notes in the margins, mark the key passages, underline so many sentences, and then let the book go, so that it may find its way into my hands.

gross vehicle weight

No line without one weighted word.

same poem

There

When Trakl crossed over, the angels
accused him of the same poem
again and again. He held up
the face God gave him
and showed them the deep and lovely
line a single, recurring tear,
sliding earthward,
carved on a stone cheek.

—Gregory Orr, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

makes a noise

You should hear a snap when you break a line.

stanza break

He would break his lines, but would never leave space between lines. That blank space was abyss.

a teacher's limits

Even with Rilke as a mentor, and with the benefit of his stirring advice, Kappus didn’t make it as a poet or artist.

one poem printed

Every poet should have one poem printed as a letterpress broadside.

no nails

When the materials were available, they commissioned a contractor to build a three-story mission house exactly like the one that had been destroyed by fire. In the compound, carpenters cut timbers, gouged mortises, shaped tenons, whittled scores of wooden pegs and bored holes for them, until all the parts for the house were in a neat pile; then, in three days, they put the whole thing together,...without any nails as all.

—John Hersey, Hiroshima: A new edition with a final chapter written 40 years after the explosion, (Knopf, 1985), 85.

only names now

They are names only now, in that sad slow almost silent ten years that precedes a poet’s death.

family language

Prose and poetry are the language’s siblings. That they would share resemblance should surprise no one.

too much order

There is something about too close attention to metrics that tilts to science and away from art.

no game

He spoke of poetry as a form of play. I hope I’m not picked for that game.

reading to the limit

Once he believed he could read till he found the reason for all thing—read till it all fell in place.

inch by inch

So aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are. America inch by inch. This has nothing to do with evaluation or usefulness.

—Fairfield Porter, “Letters to Claire and Robert White.” Parenthèse, No. 4, 212.

[Quoted in Douglas Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT (U. of Michigan, 1996)]

non-literary

There are authors who I say to myself, I’d rather see the movie than read the book.

nothing irregular here

The meter was regular and the poetry regular too.

he put the me in memorial

In memory of my friend the departed poet, I will read two of my poems about him.

no course charted

It’s common for poets to say they have no idea where their poems are going when they start writing them, and one can readily see this is true by the poems themselves.

you stumble on them

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

—Novalis
Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things. - Blüthenstaub (1798).

you can't make it up

News report headlines often offer whole poems:
Missing Houston man's body found in his car trunk in Dallas.

pure and imperfect

A poem that was absolutely pure in all its imperfections.

disappearing title

One of those titles that dissipate the moment the poem is read.

gifted lines

Cento:
I couldn’t think of anything on my own,
so I offer you these lines by others.

just say it

“In this essay I propose to study the development of...,” is an example of what makes academic essays insufferable.

bright star

An image that could blot the sun.

three lines away

One is always three lines away from getting it all said, once and for all.
-
Actually, I usually write about whatever swims into my mind. And since I’m always, unlike Heraclitus, sinking in some water, it’s usually the same fish that swim in—ghostfish, deathfish, firefish, whatever can rise to the top.
-
Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer.
-
I think the absence of people in my poems enhances their presence in the objects and the landscapes.
-
More often than not, the title is all a poem needs of narrative structure.
-
Poetry is an exile’s art. Anyone who writes it seriously, writes from an exile’s point of view.
-
We write approximations.

—Charles Wright, “Halflife: A commonplace notebook” in Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews 1977-87 (U. of Michigan Press, 1988)

invisible influence

The first time the actors rehearsed the scene in the bedroom, the bureaus were empty props. The director had them fill the drawers with their own underwear, bras, socks, jeans, t-shirts and such. In the next rehearsal, though none of the clothes were visible, the two actors lived the scene.

feeding the web's maw

There is no poem so lacking in intellectual nourishment that the internet will not eat it.

might be both

No easy answer: Was that a poem or a dream you just told me?

careful where you step

The droppings of poets were all about. Someone must have been feeding them prompts again.

would move the world

The line that was an Archimedean lever.

dark star moments

To feel the center of a poem, one has to have felt the significance of all of the poem’s moments, moments of lesser as well as greater intensity that nevertheless are crucial to the poem’s structure and cumulative power. […]

The center can occur anywhere in the poem. It can be a phrase or a stanza, or it may reveal its energy in the gap between stanzas. It can be a moment where the poem’s tension is most palpably enacted, where the poem’s time frames or layers interact simultaneously, where the texture of the poem undergoes significant variation, where the poem contradicts itself, or where the poem seem to quicken and gather itself in a passage that acts as a kind of net. The center is where the reader feels most powerfully the sensations of the poem’s theme. And nearly always, the center contains a pivot or surprise that gives the whole poem simultaneously light and darkness, hence considerable range.

I call these moments “dark star” moments, after an image in a beautifully crafted poem by James Tate titled Consumed. This poem manages, through apparently conventional rhetorical gestures of question and answer, elaboration on that answer and then conclusion, to catapult the reader into a state of uncertainty that is bracing, absolute, and utterly resistant to paraphrase:

Consumed by James Tate

—Leslie Ullman, “A ‘Dark Star’ Passes Through It,” Library of Small Happiness (Three: A Taos Press, 2017)

filled in the blanks

Poets write the white space too.

one and many

In order to say something insightful about any one poem, you need to have read enough others.

shared reading

Not to explain the poem, not to know the poem exactly, yet still trying to find a shared reading of the poem, however imperfect or partial.

old marquee

Like on the marquee of a closed-down theater, letters had tilted, slipped down or fallen entirely from the title.

to reveal the real

Using the imagination not for sake of pure fancy, but to better apprehend reality, to look inside or to glimpse the seldom seen sides of things.

turn back

Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies—those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness. ‘Un-,’ ‘not,’ ‘non,’ ‘no,’ ‘never,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘nowhere’ and other isotopes of the same linguistic element are present in his last lines, time and time again. ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, could have been the poster child for this lecture, but there are dozens more such endings, and this from a relatively modest output…

—Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures (Faber, 2021)

get lost

The reverie that one must get lost in before anything is revealed.

stone room

A stanza that is a room made of stone.

image test

Is it an image or an idle detail?

maybe said too much

You can’t walk back that line.

noise of the soul

He sits in a cramped attic,
The candle stub stings the eye
While the pencil in his hand
Converses with him in private.

He writes a song of sad thoughts,
Catches the shadow of the past within his heart,
And this noise…this noise of the soul…
He will sell tomorrow for a ruble.

—Sergei Yesenin, The Last Poet of the Village: poems by Sergei Yesenin (Sensitive Skin Books, 2019), translated by Anton Yakovlev

first where

Avant-gardists arguing over who got there first, never questioning if there was any there there (or was it like Stein’s Oakland).

double bind

He had to discipline his mind to resist restraint in his art.

not a couplet

The cathedral towers of Chartres don’t rime.

preemptive strike

Draft cover note:

Dear Editor,
I both suspect your capacity and reject your right to pass judgement on the merits of my poetry, thus you must accept the accompanying poems forthwith.

bottomless feeling

In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of association) increases the excitement of the poetry.
[…]
We often feel elation when reading Homer, Neruda, Dickinson, Vallejo, and Blake because the poet is following some arc of association that corresponds to the inner life of objects he or she speaks of, for example, the association between lids of eyes and the bark of stones [de Nerval’s poem "Golden Lines"]. The associative paths are not private to the poet, but are somehow inherent in the universe.
[…]
The poet who is “leaping” makes a jump from an object soaked in conscious psychic substance to an object soaked in latent or instinctive psychic substance. One real joy of poetry—not the only one—is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

—Robert Bly, “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (Harper & Row, 1990)

i is i

To use the term ‘speaker’ when talking about the ‘I’ in a poem offers a useful distancing from the poet—but even in a persona poem or dramatic monologue the personal ‘I’ pervades the poem.

deep ink

All I can say is his best poems were his tattoos.

like orpheus

Poet, go down singing.

is it live or memorex

Even the present tense is recorded and merely played back as though live.

something to show for it

Workshop was cancelled, so he may not have had the benefit of consultation but he had the consolation of a poem written.

used to the stars

But poets have never grown used to the stars; and it is their business to prevent anybody else ever growing used to them.

—G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1932)

interior design

The saddest books are those used as décor by interior designers.

language zones

Like climate zones the poem’s language may be lush or spare, or either in different places.

still hungry

A manifesto is a menu with nothing to eat.

sit satisfied

There are times when after much searching and consideration we must be satisfied just to sit with the poem's mysteries.