scholarship or sensibility

Distinguishing between a criticism based on scholarship or one relying on sensibility.

follow the leader

That phenomenon of a workshop when the poets start writing poems in the manner of the group’s leader or its most distinguished voice.

numerical clutter

Annoying to read poems made of brief entries—a phrase, a sentence or two—that have been separated into numbered sections. The numbers serve no function other than division, where blank space or at most an asterisk would suffice.

communication in depth

Dickey offers a provocative definition of poetry in the discussion of Alun Lewis: “It’s not ‘literature’; it’s that human communication in depth that the best poetry is.” To say that a poet is great is not to praise indiscriminately. “Human communication in depth” can miss the mark. Dickey cautions the audience during the session on William Butler Yeats: “There are small writers that you can like without equivocation or without reservation, but I think there are no great writers that you have no reservation about whether or not you like them. Toward the end of this volume in the lecture on Dylan Thomas, he identifies two of his choices for greatness: “Of the great original users of the English language, who brought something truly original to the use of English in poetry, the two finest, the most original in whole canon of English poetry, are Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas…But of the two, the more original is Dylan Thomas.”

Quoted in James Dickey: Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry (U. of S. Carolina Press, 2004), edited by Donald J. Greiner

less of the same

You have written and published a dozen books and you are almost unknown among fellow poets, not to mention any greater audience. Is it not time to slow down, to re-set, and to see if you can find a strain of poetry that will be recognized?

is it your move or mine

I played chess for long hours with Jack Gilbert without saying anything of consequence.

not this way or that

No one way to write a true poem.

judge unknown

He knew he was out of his times when he couldn’t recognize the name of the poet judging a major prize.

airhead editor

Speaking about poetics and essays about poetry, the new editor said she was 'against five-syllable words'. Someone unable to lift her head, to strain her neck to look beyond the barrier of what she knows. Does 'responsibility' have too many syllables?

itinerant poet

A Cure for Poetry

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Thro’ which the living Homer begg’d his bread.

(Anonymous; after the Latin of George Buchanan)

[Quoted in The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs (Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1977), edited by Geoffrey Grigson]

different reasons

Philosophers and poets are fond of the aphorism for different reasons.

responsible reader

It’s not all on the writer—the reader too has responsibilities to the text.

echo form

Two people walk into a poetry reading late, while the reader is reciting her pantoum. The guy says to his date, 'Gosh, there's a terrible echo in this room'.

good parenting

The parents grew concerned finding that their teenage son was reading poetry books, so they purchased many new video game titles for him.

to make of or to listen to

Poets who are not so much makers as they are listeners.

come up for air

In poetry the right margin is not like in a swimming pool, where the swimmer must make a turn against a wall. The line ends where the swimmer in open water comes up for air.

head turning sentence

An aphorism should turn a head.

words in the night

I was in Buenos Aires recently (I know, ‘Don’t cry for me…’). The trip gave me a chance to reread Merwin’s translations of the ‘aphorisms’ of Antonio Porchia (1886-1968). I put quote-marks around the word aphorisms because Porchia objected to being called an aphorist. An Italian immigrant to Argentina, he opened a print shop with his brother, and struggled to make a living in his adopted country, all the while refining his short writings. He published one book, Voices, in several editions. He was never fully embraced by the Argentine literati. But as Merwin says in his intro, “Shortly before his death he had been recorded reading from his Voices, and for some time after he died his voice was used by a Buenos Aires radio station, each night as it signed off. In Porchia’s slow, deep utterance…"

Before I travelled my road I was my road.

One lives in hope of becoming a memory.

He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

A wing is neither heaven nor earth.

The world understands nothing but words, and you come into it with almost none.

When there is no treasure to show, night is the treasure.

It is a long time now since I asked heaven for anything , and still my arms have not come down.

It is easier for me to see everything as one thing than to see one thing as one thing.

A large heart can be filled with very little.

He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire to make something.

Night is a world lit by itself.

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.

The important and unimportant are the same only at the start.

—Antonio Porchia, Voices (Cooper Canyon, 2003) by Antonio Porchia, translation by W. S. Merwin.

no more me

We await the poems that will come after personal and family content are exhausted.

equal levels

Artists should realize the political is no more worthy than the aesthetic of elevation.

in buenos aires

First stanza of Jorge Luis Borges' "Poem about Gifts"...

   Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
   Of this manifesting the mastery
   Of God, who with excelling irony
   Gives me at once both books and night.

[Borges blind or near so at this point, from Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

The old Biblioteca Nacional where Borges served as director from 1955 to 1973.

ad hoc

Seldom serial, his poems were ad hoc.

experience, interpretation, opinion

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.—Susan Sontag

Someone posted the above quote without a reference. Likely it comes from Sontag’s great essay “Against Interpretation.” However, I do want to quibble with her statement. Of course 'experience' should be regarded as being of a higher order than 'interpretation'. But then one realizes in the dialog with others how odd and even cockamamie experience can be, which drags experience down to the level of opinion. (Opinion being what we all have, as the saying goes.) So I think there are smart people (call them intellectuals, if you will) who we should look to for interpretation. Not that we must accept their interpretations at face value, but they give us something worthy with which to argue over, and challenge us to refine our own thinking about the work/art.

fallen leaves

When I was raking leaves I started to think about all the poetry books published in the past year.

outwit the writer

One hopes that what is written is a bit smarter than the writer.

counterweights

Like perfect counterweights, the words in balance along the poetic line.

textus fugit

Lives are fleeting and so are all but a few literary texts.

pen at hand

When asked, “Have you got a pen?”—he replied, “Yes, I’m a poet, I always have a pen.”

accuracy, spontaneity, mystery

Accuracy is the essence in any consideration of Bishop’s poetry. Those of her poems which fail…do so more often than not because they’re imprecise in matters of tone and feeling. The Library of America volume includes an untitled and fragmentary essay on poetry, tentatively dated to ‘the late 1950s - early 1960s,’ in which Bishop states that the three qualities she prizes most in poetry are ‘Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery’ (the italics are hers). To illustrate these qualities, she gives examples from George Herbert, Hopkins and Baudelaire, as well as from Auden, Lowell, Moore and Dylan Thomas. She might have included much of her own work; accuracy, spontaneity and mystery are perhaps its most distinctive traits, and in spontaneity – or rather, the illusion of spontaneity – she seems to surpass most of those she cites. Spontaneity is, of course, the slipperiest of the three. None of the poets she singles out in the essay is ‘spontaneous’, in any usual sense, nor was Bishop herself. It was the effect of spontaneity she admired…

—Eric Ormsby, “Ancient Chills,” Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)

turn it over

The Talmud records that Ben Bag-Bag, a scholar and disciple of Hillel, counseled:
   “Turn it over and turn it over, for all is therein”
The ‘it’ is the Torah, but the same could be said of reading and studying a great poem.

blurbs denied

If you’re not embarrassed by your blurbs, you’re undeserving of such praise.

only abyss below

Often a poem must end with the bottom dropping out—and the reader must try to enjoy the free-fall without screaming too much.

about poems

It’s about the poems not where they were published.

not on the same page

Two poets were talking about the value of reading, how it informed their work, and probably they were reading entirely different books.

tell me what you know

I want your poem to tell me how much you know about poetry.

intensely dismal poem

    In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning her husband [Thomas] is at his desk:
    Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

—David Markson, Vanishing Point (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004)

substitution of terms

When you see a good move, look for a better one.
—Emanuel Lasker

When you write a good line, look for a better one.

under the hood

Emotion being the poem’s motor.

revision's end

It was while revising the poem you realized it wasn’t worth the effort.

vehicle language

In a poem, language is the vehicle and not the road, nor its destination.

safe for now

It’s a good thing you put that copyright mark next to your name beneath the poem, otherwise poets would be lined up to plagiarize your masterpiece.

wasn't it

Vivaldi Years

I lay forever, didn’t I, behind those old windows,
listening to Bach and resurrecting my life.
I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes
while the violins shrieked and the cellos trembled.
It was a crazy youth, wasn’t it, letting
my mind soar like that, giving myself
up to poetry the way I did.
It was a little like Goethe’s, wasn’t it,
a little like Eugene O’Neill’s, one joyous
sadness after another. That was the everlasting
life, wasn’t it. The true world without end.

—Gerald Stern, Paradise Poems (1984)

prose all along

Whether or not cast in meter and/or rhyme, if the lines are readable, then they’re prose.

hardly a trail

A poem may reveal almost nothing of its path: a broken twig, a stone disturbed, with little else to follow.

not safe

The poetry workshop should not be a safe space. They’re talking about your poem, not you.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

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

not undertanding

One can misunderstand a poem in a thousand ways. That’s okay, that’s what it means to try to read poetry.

no time

The best poems are atemporal.

intent vs. use

An author may write with intent but it’s good to remember what matters to the reader is use.

small check

Even during the times when he was making hundreds of thousands per year, it pleased him to get $200 for doing a reading or $50 for a published poem.

thousand yard stare

You can recognize a writer by the way s/he stares off into space.

rid of convention

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history. Well, I don't know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did.

—Richard Serra (1998)

barrel of the bat

The last line was like Babe Ruth’s ‘called shot’: He all but said it was coming and then with one swing of a line, he delivered.

course and not conclusion

Lead you readers forward but let them draw their own conclusions.

find a translation

One of the biggest mistakes I made early in my reading life was to pass over the foreign words and phrases I encountered. My loss. Now I pause and get at least a rough or partial translation. Of course now the web makes things easier. In any case, my reading has been deepened by taking the time to find a translation.

word from nowhere

The improbable word that makes possible the whole poem.

poetic asides

There are poems one wants to publish that aren’t the poems one wants to be known for.

for want of a pen

Sometimes I think I became a writer solely because I love holding a nice pen.

substitution of terms

Anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
—Niels Bohr

Anyone who thinks they can talk about poetry without feeling dizzy hasn’t yet understood the first thing about it.

writing studio

     The unimaginably cramped cell in which St. John of the Cross was once imprisoned for months, beaten repeatedly and virtually starved, but where he nonetheless managed to compose some of his finest verses.
     In a building that no longer exists—but can still be seen in El Greco’s View of Toledo.

—David Markson, The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)

write the room

A prose poet knows how to ‘write’ the room.

sleight of letters

The word is the alphabet’s prestidigitation.

bohemians at the gate

Bohemination: When the neighborhood becomes filled with artists and poets, and the panhandlers are driven out for lack of prospects with money in their pockets.

uncontainable

There is no form equal to this content, it must be allowed to spill without container or spout.

train whistle

A line of poetry that was a train whistle far off in the night.

crossing boundaries

Those visual aspects of Ramón’s prose are of paramount importance: temporal qualities are subordinated to the spatial predilections of the author. That is why very little “happens” in his fiction. It bears pointing out in passing, that painting crosses national as well as artistic boundaries much more easily than does literature.

Aphorisms: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, selected and translated from the texts entitled greguerias, with a critical introduction by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1989)

ready for it

Poet, don’t just pull another epiphany out of the hat.

fussy too much

There is such a thing as fussy revision that matters not when it comes to the reader's experience.

light verse ahead

Playing to pop culture can only lead to light verse.

hounded by form

Poet, form will keep coming for you.

without emotion or argument

Writing wherein nothing is at stake either emotionally or in terms of argument.

not equal

Remember that no poem is equal to a life.

three-legged stool

I’ve always felt that Rilke stands with one foot in the nineteenth century and other planted in the twenty-first. I’ve sometimes thought of him, especially in The Elegies as the poetic leg of a three-legged stool—the other two being Einstein and Freud/Jung.

—Art Beck, Etudes: A Rilke Recital, Translations and Commentary (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021)

[Quote encountered in a review of the above book in Wally Swist’s A Writer’s Statement of Beauty (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2022)]

figures dancing

Reading a poem and thinking that the printed letters are figures dancing.

supplied beyond demand

The modest demand for poetry books faces an amplest supply.