weave for whatever it is

Find a language pattern that matters to the poem’s content.

no through-cut

For him the thesis never came easily.

through the side door

Frost entered the Modern canon through the farmhouse’s side door, with the nineteenth century’s snow still on his boots, bringing in a load of firewood for the stove.

rosebud image

Looking for his ‘Rosebud’ image: the thing that would flash upon one’s mind in the moment before death.

images floating by

Images as flotsam of the oceanic mind.

useless objects

When Arp writes of a “bladeless knife from which a handle is missing,” when Norge speaks of a “time when the onion used to make people laugh,” we have images, configurations, which employ archetypal elements but are not properly speaking archetypes. Instead, we have the emergence of entities which only by the force of utterance and the upheaval they cause in the imagination and thought acquire existence and even reality. These “useless objects” have a strange authority. Even as visionary acts, they consist of particulars and thus curiously provide us with a semblance of actual experience.

—Charles Simic, “Negative Capability and its Children,” Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (Tendril, 1984), edited by Paul Mariani and George Murphy

gull line

You can ask for no better line than a gull cutting across the horizon near dusk.

was a tank

The poem was a tank...it was self-contained and could not be stopped.

waste no word

 Poet, waste no word or thus lessen the thrust of the line.

marble face

Each letter set like in piton in the marble face of the page.

function, structure and design.

The Roman architect Vitruvius suggested that buildings can be judged according to their utilitas, firmitas, and venustas, that is, according to their fitness for their purpose, their structural soundness, and their beauty; or, in Richard Krautheimer’s version, their function, structure, and design.

—Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art, (HarperCollins, 1989)

[The same criteria could be applied to a good poem.]

stance against subject

By style one finds the stance necessary to confront the subject.

that poem that

That poem that does that. You’ll know it when you hear/read it.

load-bearing line

A line must bear the weight of the one or many above it.

go for a walk

Paul Klee’s suggestion to ‘go for a walk with a line’, applies to poetry as well.

rhyme made me do it

Another insipid turn of phrase brought forth by making a rhyme.

music of thought

The music of a poem can come from its thoughts.

claw marks

Every poem shall be a tearing up of a poem,
not a poem, but claw marks.

—Edith Södergran (1892-1923), ending of the poem “Decision,” translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström, The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden (Milkweed Editions and The Poetry Foundation, 2013).

life index

A poem that was the index to your existence.

experience everlasting

The first time you read the poem you knew you’d encountered an inexhaustible resource.

sword and armor

Orpheus tried to make a song strong as a sword and armor.

file upload complete

They don’t curate, they don’t edit: Presses that will publish almost anything because print-on-demand technology demands so little of the publisher…just a good pdf file to upload.

this way

Having a way with words will only get you so far. You must have a way into the world that others will want to follow.

big book, big evil

Callimachus is best known today for his verse. He is the author of the elegy to a fellow poet, Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, often anthologized in its translation by William Johnson Cory: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.’ A proponent of shorter forms—hymns, elegies, epigrams—he is said to have coined the witticism mega biblion, mega kakon (‘big book, big evil’) to express his disdain for epic poetry. Nevertheless, it is his work not as a poet but as a scholar which will concern us, and here Callimachus was responsible for a very big book indeed, the Pinakes, said to have run to 120 papyrus scrolls.

[…]

Callimachus may have been passed over for the role of Chief Librarian [Library of Alexandria], but, in compiling the Pinakes, it was he who did most of all to preserve the library’s memory. Pinakes simply means ‘Tables’, as in writing boards or ‘tablets’, and the full title of Callimachus’s work was the Tables of Men Illustrious in Every Field of Learning and of Their Writing. It was a catalogue of all the works housed in the great library.

—Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age (W. W. Norton, 2021) [31- 32]

worse angels

Words had got the worst of him.

they who believe

Heartened that there were people who believed more in her poetry than she did.

not imprimatur

Print is not imprimatur: A poem being in a book is not the poem’s imprimatur.

tethered to existence

One believes the poem came from nowhere, while each line could be traced back to life.

grape to raisin

Don’t be the critic who makes a raisin from a grape.

paris arcades

In 1929, Benjamin once again believed that he could pinpoint when, where, and how this breakthrough into the unreal and universally falsifying spirit of his age occurred. In Paris, in fact, the capital of the nineteenth century. Not in the form of an individual or a book, but in a new form of construction, built from iron and steel: the Paris arcades, the cabinets of curiosity, bathed in a perpetual artificial twilight, of coming consumer capitalism. In their window displays the whole disparate world of commodities, forms, and symbols was placed side by side for the onlooker’s gaze, and in the end offered for purchase. Neither entirely an internal space nor part of the streetscape, the arcades were deliberately arranged as liminal places that leveled out every fundamental difference. Half cave, half house, half passageway and half room.

In the finite individuals who strolled aimlessly through them, with their always brimming, constantly redecorated vitrines, these arcades created the appearance of infinite availability, which would extend to the rest of the world—and anesthetize it.

—Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy (Penguin Books, 2020), trans. by Shaun Whiteside. [343-344]

for you and your mom

Print litmags typically give you two contributor copies, because they know you’ll want to keep a copy and that your mom will want to read your work too.

art and money

To make money by one’s art should be nothing more than a delightful and unexpected convergence. Like running into an old friend someplace you never could have imagined.

special case

Any poem beyond a couple pages in length is a special case of prose.

end work

Sometimes an artist will write or sing or paint something they know they can never exceed, and their creative life ends right there.

valued but unread

What most book collectors overlook is that the material object of the book would be absolutely worthless without the text within. Yet once the book becomes collectible, the object itself is barely if ever read for fear of harming the artifact.

cut that alters

A line break that preempts the full thought and thus alters it.

art as performance

During one of my visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesn’t correct or repaint, ever. He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it.

—Janet Malcolm, “Forty-one False Starts" [#4], Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

too close to poem

I would posit that if your favorite poem is one you’ve written, you are not a good poet.

cannot wear out

No matter how many times you read or hear it, you can’t wear out a good poem.

unknown vector

Be the poet they didn’t seeing coming.

aesthetic choice

An eclectic aesthetics. A monolithic aesthetics. A widespread aesthetics. A one-track aesthetics.

lapsarian

A lovely paragraph that was a lapsed poem.

bias in us

Just as we have unconscious/implicit bias in social settings, we also must own them when we’re confronted with works of art. No critic is without them.

three quotes re words

Here is a very famous quote from W.H. Auden: “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” On the other hand, here is my favorite quote from Alden Nowlan, a Canadian poet from the Maritimes: “When you read my poems, forget about the words—words mean nothing to me—what concerns me is the unutterable loneliness of the human heart.” He said words mean nothing to me. Can you imagine any American poet, or any other poet from anywhere, saying such a thing? Why does language have such a hold on poets? My buddy Joel Oppenheimer, now dead, used to say, “Poetry is NOT about language, it’s about something.”

—David Budbill, “Poetry: Special or Ordinary,” Vermont Poets and Their Craft (Sundog Poetry Ctr., 2019)

tail that stuck

Each successive turn of a line tried to shake the poem’s subject matter.

little big mag

A little magazine’s significance derives from its editorial competence.

empty chair

Sitting there in workshop she was like an empty chair—it was clear the moment she spoke how little poetry and criticism she’d read.

air and light

The poem may be a closed shutter, but you should push open the louvres a bit to let some air and light in.

strong stomach

You’ll have to stomach a lot if you’re going to be a taste-maker.

line tuckered out

In his [essay] “Not About Julian Schnabel,” [Rene] Ricard wrote about the kind of line that “just gets tuckered out after a while,” adding, “The beautiful charcoal smudges and style we can follow from Matisse through de Kooning to Rivers, Serra, and, in its ultimate decadence, to Susan Rothenberg are perfect illustrations.” He went on, “Judy Rifka told me that when she was in art school all her teachers drew that way. That was the way you were taught, and no matter how lousy the drawing was, it always looked pretty good, like art.” The conventional bohemianism that Ricard embodies may be going the way of the art line he so tellingly describes.

—Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

take a selfie

He had the same author photo for ten years. Doesn’t he know his smartphone has a camera?

small steps

You like to think that the pages of the literary magazine you’ve published in are small steps toward notice and attention.

wordplay poetics

When I hear a poet say ‘wordplay’ is an important aspect of his/her poetry, I feel sorry for them, knowing all the insignificant poems they’re bound to write.

book signing

After the poetry reading, a man came up to her where she was signing books and said: “I found this inscribed copy of your book at the Goodwill—if you’ll just cross out Sally’s name and write Tom over it, I’ll be all set.”

editorial light

The light went out on literature when editors were forced out of publishing by the profit motive or forsook their sacred duty to become cheerleaders.

investigative presence

Too much emphasis on the creative aspect of the arts and not enough on the artist as an investigative presence in the world.

slow for construction

Writing in a notebook makes composition slower and revision harder, and that can be a good thing.

you too will rest

This is the most famous German poem ever written, one which all German children must learn by heart:

      On all hilltops
      There is peace,
      In all treetops
      You will hear
      Hardly a breath.
      Birds in the woods are silent.
      Just wait, soon
      You too will rest.

The idea of the poem is simple: in the woods everything is asleep, and you will sleep, too. The purpose of the poetry is not to try to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.

—Milan Kundera, Immortality (HarperCollins, 1999) translated by Peter Kussi

broken things

Scrabbling up the landslide on Parnassus, he realized it was broken statuary he was climbing over.

forget about it

After reading so many ‘memoir poems’ it makes one wish poets had poor memories.

plain and floral

The book’s poems were rather plain, while the book’s blurbs were beyond florid.

slipped off the edge

Poems that veer away from major themes slip easily into oblivion.

poet again

Sometimes all I need to do is to think of those times when I first thought myself a poet, and I’m a poet again.

to see clearly

…the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion—all in one.

—John Ruskin, “Of Modern Landscape”

glories of analog

Makes me sad to think of the young poets who do all their writing on their phones. They will never know the notebook in all its analog glory.

vanity awards

The ‘International Book Awards’: Send us $74 and we’ll send you some stickers to put on the cover of your book. You have to pay for the stickers too.

ways to go wrong

There are many ways for a poem to go wrong, and in composition one would do well to follow all of them.

have you noticed

The quotes on the back of Poetry magazine are like bad Instagram poetry.

need to be

It’s a bad poem, but if you needed to write it, maybe it has worth.

wrenched diction

Lines that are wrenched suggest a powerful emotion has wrenched them, such as Hopkin’s, “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind”; but even the slightest displacement of customary acts or values will do it. For instance, “We once were in love, made love and kissed without a harmful history,” [Hardy] puts kissing after love and last in an amorous past blessed by brevity.

—William H. Gass, “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence,” Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011)

lost & found

Yes, things are lost in the notebook—then things are discovered therein as if you hadn’t written them.

mind the gap

Public consciousness of poetry is bookended by the great themes and humorous ditties, little in between do they know.

water is fine

Not one to dally, Dickinson drops in quickly to her subject: I often think of the her dashes as those wooden docks jutting out into country ponds, where on summer days she may have desired to jump into the cool water.

strength in numbers

One of those times when the open mike readers bested the featured poet.

usual speech

Poet, read aloud the way you talk.