call it style

He thought that if he was bad at some aspects of writing, those errors might manifest themselves as a kind of style.

struck by a chisel or ax

All edifices of art need to be built upon thought’s solid foundation.

If it’s not a poem, no matter what form it’s in, it’s not a poem.

Deep eclectic thought, rendered through easily apprehended language, creates poetry of the highest order.

I live: I sing.

It’s natural that poets thirst for some kind of a constitution: In addition to ensuring the people’s daily bread as well as their well-being, a country must safeguard its art from destruction.

If, while writing, your work feels forced, when it is read by others, it will feel even more forced.

What are the secrets for writing poetry?
—With naïve and honest eyes, look at the world, and convey what you comprehend and what you feel through the simplest forms of language.

The beauty inherent in poetry is the luminance of humanity’s upward-striving spirit expressed entirely through the poet’s passion. This kind of luminance not only glitters and splashes like embers from a fire in darkness, but also shoots out like sparks from a rock struck by a chisel or ax.

—Ai Qing, “Excerpts from the Notebooks,” Selected Poems (Crown, 2021), translated by Robert Dorsett

[n.b.: Ai Qing was the father of the artist Ai Weiwei. Ai Qing was a poet and dissident imprisoned for resisting the totalitarian regime in China.]

margin width

All poets are marginalized, but some have wider margins to write/work in.

it goes like this

He recited the poem from bad memory and somehow managed to improve upon the composition.

two-way street

One can only hold the critic to account when he quotes from the text on which he expounds.

in the foothills

In the foothills of Parnassus you’ll see fires burning at night. Places where poets had stopped to camp, left with nothing to burn but their books.

three realms

The finest writing is for the voice. There are several good, not to say decisive, reasons for this. No word is a word by itself. Every word is multiple, and not simply because there are homonyms and homophones hanging around, pretending to be friends. A word is made of sounds. A word is made of marks. A word is made of little muscle movements in the throat which accompany our interior speech—that invisible, inaudible, yet clearly heard interior talk of which Samuel Beckett made himself the master. So there are two spoken tongues to set against the one we write. And if we allow the written word to stand for the spoken one, and the silent speech to precede both, then the written word works in three realms at once, not just one.

—William H. Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

commercially viable poet

Strange pairing: A poet with an agent.

bad fit

In art, it takes courage to be incongruous.

stand in

These days it may be worth it to hire a model for your author photo.

right wrong word

The word you worry about using may be the one that makes the poem work. Turns out it is the right wrong word.

loose sheets

I haven’t got a manuscript. I have only a pile of poems.

prose buttress

A foot/headnote to a poem is but a prose buttress. Ideally free-standing the poem should be.

take off our wings

To Grazyna, from Starachowice
You see poetry as pure sublimity, eternity, sighs and moans—in quantities unrivaled even by fin de siècle nameday parties for young ladies. Such flourishes go nowhere with contemporary readers, say, even your nearest and dearest will, upon hearing a single sentence, glance panic-stricken at their interlocutor and suddenly recall urgent errands in town. So, shall we take off our wings and try writing on foot?

—Wislawa Szymborska, How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) (New Directions, 2021), translated by Clare Cavanagh

[n.b.: From a collection of pieces that Szymborska wrote in her regular column called Literary Mailbox in the Polish journal Literary Life.]

totally emily

The Emily Dickinson industry—is a thing.

search me

He was not the kind of poet whose poem you’d carry in your pocket.

reverent rings

It was a book I revered and kept nearby. You could tell by the cover which was stained by rings from coffee mugs and wine glasses.

pickpocket

Plagiarism is major theft, while parody is a lesser poet picking the pocket of a master.

keep your bowstring taut

Poet, pull line after line from your quiver and let the arrows fly.

place and experience

When I read "Epic” by Patrick Kavanagh for the first time, I realized that documenting seemingly insignificant events and objects—buses included—are neither ridiculous nor melodramatic. The more I studied his poems and essays, the more I revered how Kavanagh sought to develop a praxis that is both inclusive and individual: not solely concerned with audience and legacy, but more aligned with place and experience.

—Roan Ellis-O’Neill, Hold Open the Door: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology 2022 (University College of Dublin Press), edited by M. McCann, S. Meline, N. Zak/Aria Eipe, M. Prince, and F. Ormsby.

slippage

There is slippage in all poems, the language has its limits. It's like working on a sign-board with a bucket of moveable type. You're never sure if you'll be able to fit all the letters together properly and you're unsure whether or not you have the letters needed to make all the words you want to display (or say).

ignored or eclipsed

Maybe it’s not that certain poets get neglected; perhaps it’s a matter of a few poets garnering too much attention and praise.

paper tomb

In the internet age, books are where poems go to die.

tech heavy, content light

So called technical innovations in one’s writing are often cover for a lack of compelling content.

facile appraisal

He was one to judge a book by the author photo.

perceptions rearranged

As far as I see it, a poem has business to exist, really, if there's a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it or having used it. The poem is always capable of being a subversive agent, psychologically, sensuously, however you like.

—Roy Fisher, Interviews Through Time and Selected Prose (Shearsman Books, 2000), p. 64.

language cobbler

Louis Zukofsky, raised on the Lower East Side, was a cobbler of language. I don’t think he ever looked up or arose from his station to speak fully, freely. I see him with his head down over a bench (his desk), piecing various parts of language together.

wellings up

Poets who will never be known by a single poem, or handful of anthology pieces. Their work was too diffuse, and only welled up memorably here and there within the oeuvre.

carries well

The wonder of poetry: made of words, and thus so portable.

freebird

At the poetry reading they were all holding up lighters
and calling out for me to read “Free Bird.” I went flapping
through pages of my book, but I couldn't find that poem.

defied without end

No definition of poetry is needed. Each poem defines itself. Then the next poem defies that definition.

my office

I have spent many hundreds of hours shooting [a basketball] on this court, with its view of the Bay and Oakland hills beyond. One day the view was mysteriously obliterated and my eyes burned, as it turned out by ash from the terrible Oakland hills fire.

There is nowhere that I am more at my ease than in this place, shooting. If I have a poem that I’m working on, I will roll it over and over again in my head, like a child rolling a marble between his fingers, feeling the texture and weight of each syllable. You may think me immodest, but I have done some of my best work up here on Corona Heights, that’s what this place is called. You might say this is my office. Call me a wastrel, if you like.

—August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

distill and spill

Poets of distill and poets of spill it all.

lap poem

As the workshop leader proceeded around the table, I thought I could hear the woman beside me tearing up her copies in her lap. And when he called her turn to present a poem, she lifted the scraps of paper from her lap and let them fall on the table in a pile.

touching bottom

Written in letters that could touch bottom.

wrong words

When he proudly showed me his erasure poem, I said he’d erased the wrong words.

paying for it

By the time he got his manuscript accepted, he figured he’d spent enough on entry and reading fees to have self-published the book in a first edition hardback of 1000 copies.

second ending

When the poem ends on an expected note, try adding just one more line but one that comes to rest at a slight angle to what was said before.

Example from the ending of Al Purdy’s “"The Last Picture in the World”:

            almost sculpture
   except that it's alive
   brooding immobile permanent
   for half an hour
   a blue heron
   and it occurs to me
   that if I were to die at this moment
   that picture would accompany me
   wherever I am going
   for part of the way

Notice how easily the poet may have settled for the ending “wherever I am going,” but the addition of the phrase “for part of the way,” undercuts the certainty and leaves the poem in a less measurable state.

tenfold

The poet knew he was on his way when his book sold in the tens of tens.

fee for fee

Are the major presses just trading permission fees back and forth?

blank and expectant

It was one of those lovely blank notebooks you just knew you could write great things in.

shaker austerity

…there is, probably unintentionally, something of the Shaker austerity in [Niedecker’s] work, what Jonathan Williams describes in this poem, circa 1959, as “a lovely sound, put together with hand-tooled pegs”:

     My friend tree
     I sawed you down
     but I must attend
     an older friend
     the sun

Niedecker’s work emphasizes proportion, line, simplicity. The spaces between words and lines, usually emphasized in the typography, lineation, and enjambments, functioned for Niedecker as a reminder of the silence from which the poems emerged, by which they were pervaded, and to which they returned.

—August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2018 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

cards play themselves

In poker, when the cards are laid on the table, we say ‘the cards play themselves’: no interpretation needed to determine who has the better hand. So it should be in book reviewing—quote heavily from the book, and let the lines themselves show their relative value.

odd man in

Often Dante gets inserted in a list/lineage of English poets.

parts of the whole

A lyric poem retains its wholeness; while the long poem is known by its lyric parts.

not debut

After a first book published late in life, the poet corrected the interviewer: This is not a ‘debut’ collection, this is the best I could do to date.

repetition or insistence

Gertrude Stein once declared that ‘there is no such thing as repetition’—a surprising pronouncement form a writer whose most enduring line of poetry is a loop of intoxicating repetitions: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’. Stein distinguished the idea of repetition from insistence; in poetry, she suggested, only the latter was possible. By this logic, each time a word or phrase repeats, it lands with a different inflection. Stein’s ‘rose’ line is a perfect case in point; it begins with Rose as a proper name, which then blossoms into the flower itself, and ultimately suggests the past tense verb, ‘arose’. Stein’s string of roses has been often interpreted as an affirmation of reality over metaphor—a rose is a rose, and nothing more—but she also saw it as an intensifier, one that manifested the rose in all its vividness. ‘I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years’, Stein later wrote of her famous line in Four in America.

—Sarah Holland-Batt, “Repetition and Rhetoric: On Michael Sharkey,” Fishing for Lightning (University of Queensland Press, 2021).

note struck by an adjective

Every adjective creates a tone when applied to a noun.

new epithets

A line from André Gide’s Marshlands: “Find new epithets for ______.” Good advice.

welcome emptiness

How I enjoyed these ‘open field’ poems; especially welcome were the blank spaces in between phrases and fragments.

bird by its name

When you say ‘bird’ in a poem, think what kind of bird. When you say ‘tree’, think what kind of tree. And if it matters, and it should, then use the specific name.

act to narrative

The instant you admit any action whatever, no matter how simple, you admit some suggestion of what went before the action and of what is to follow it and of the cause and intention of the action—that is, you admit some element, however slight, of story.

—Kenyon Cox, What is Painting?: Winslow Homer and Other Essays (W. W. Norton, 1988)

annoying innovation

The poet was doing something innovative with typography—it was annoying to read.

all eyes

The poet walked into the room and all eyes were on her; and her eyes took them all in, because looking was prelude to language.

poetical failure

The most common failure of beginning poets is that they think poetry should be poetical.

art is

Art alters nature.

at talent's limit

In the end I want to feel that I made the most of my limited gifts

unable to suffer further

The critic had wanted to write a scathing review but, being a person of character, he was unable to do so—realizing he’d closed the book only a few pages in.

wide-eyed

Wide-eyed, ready for anything, I’m trying to read like a young person again.

swim out

        'The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,

rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'

—Seamus Heaney (in the voice of James Joyce), Station Island (1984)

trace story

In the briefest lyric there’s the hint of narrative.

grand steps

Like steps up to a palace door, you know by the first few lines you’ve entered the realm of a poem.

first things

A poem establishes itself first in language and then you get what it’s about.

bad blurb

I confess I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this story. I had to skip ahead many pages to get to that comforting sigh of the book closing.

prose poem is

I would have placed emphasis on the subversive character of prose poetry. For me, it is a kind of writing determined to prove that there’s poetry beyond verse and its rules. Most often it has an informal, playful air, like the rapid, unfinished caricatures left behind on café napkins. Prose poetry depends on a collision of two impulses, those for poetry and those for prose, and it can either have a quiet meditative air or feel like a performance in a three-ring circus.

—Charles Simic, "Essay on the Prose Poem," delivered on June 1, 2010 at The Poetry Festival in Rotterdam.

open to

One open to the wiles of language.

yadda yadda yaddo

A writer who took pride in having done the full circuit of residencies and retreats.

two not three

Terza rima: A sequence of interrupted couplets.

coat-hook

The title was just a coat-hook, a thing to hang a poem on.

content / style

Content of a high order needs little style.

doing the same thing

I don’t dismiss a poet for being prolific, but I am suspect of rote output.

wasted words

Poet, write through the necessary word-waste.

comes with the territory

It’s rare to find a formal poem that doesn’t sound stilted in places.

block off the chip

The book I ordered, a study of the fragment in literature, arrived today. Turns out it’s over four-hundred pages.

blood to poem

Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.

—Yannis Ritsos, Monochords (Tavern Books, 2017), translated by Paul Merchant.