fierce company

Poetry decides power, not politics
or wealth, not torment. Fierce company,
those ragged lines, spells of a magician
that become; over time, more curse than elixir.

—Dennis Barone, "Side-Straddle Hop," After Math (Cyber Wit, 2023)

radio left on

Most poems will be like a radio left on in a vacant room, a device talking into space.

consumerist cantos

It was a dollar-store Cantos, its references and allusions coming cheap and easy.

word bather

A poet who bathed in words, and words were nothing to him and everything all at once.

[Thinking of poet Peter Ganick.]

improvement by mistakes

If this poem had any typos they would be considered assets.

not words alone

Poetry
Forgive me for helping you understand
that you're not made of words alone.

—Rogue Dalton, "Poetic Art" (1974)

no ball of light

A poet who wrote attractive lines and phrases that never would cohere into the force of a poem.

says too much

Writing that suffers from the utter inability to understate.

missing person

There was plenty of personality in the poems, but little that was truly personal.

face it

My best poems are written in the furrows of my brow, in the wrinkled lines radiating from around my eyes.

human politics

He didn’t write political poems, rather he wrote human poems, and thereby their concerns were political.

inventing a new language

In a letter to Frank O’Hara (August 18, 1965), Robert Motherwell wrote a series of aphoristic statements regarding art, artists and art-making. The intent of these statements was to spur O’Hara to get started on the catalog essay for a Motherwell retrospective at MOMA which O’Hara was curating: “…when the deadline for his catalog essay arrived, O’Hara developed writer’s block. Motherwell, who had experienced many such an impasse in his painting and writing, sent O’Hara a battery of his random thoughts, written in a single morning, hoping that one of them might ignite a spark. Against the objection of the artist, who felt his thoughts had been written for private purposes, O’Hara published Motherwell’s letter in the exhibition catalog.” From The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford U. Press, 1992), edited by Stephanie Terenzio, and here is a selection of Robert Motherwell’s remarks from the letter:

Only painters and sculptors, among artists, can be exposed in toto in a few minutes—or seem to be.

The content has always to be expressed in modern terms: that is the basic premise. Joyce understood that perfectly.

The greater the precision of feeling, the more personal the work will be.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one’s feeling precisely.

What paintings can stand up against the physical presence of nature? Few, and often least of all those who have nature as the principal subject.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others! What a choice?

The drama of creativity is that one’s resources, no matter how unusual, are inadequate.

Irony, the greatest necessity of everyday life, does not work in pictures. (Neither does pathos.)

There is something princely about even the most democratic artists.

One does not have to “understand” wholly to feel pleasure.

If life was longer one could express more. Since it isn’t, stick to the essentials.

The beauty of another being’s presence.

Some children quit painting if they haven’t the proper color. Picasso says, you just use another color. Who’s right?

The supreme gift, after light, is scale.

What better way to spend one’s life than to have, as one’s primary task, the insistence on integrity of feeling? No wonder others are fascinated by artists.

Moments of joy make existence bearable: who ignores joy is immoral.

The material things of life are mere decorations. Enough space, light, and white walls make any environment workable.

The world cannot endure that artists’ money comes from so much pleasure.

The surrealist group used to demand a picture each year from its painters: the proceeds were used to support their poets. They recognized the social injustice in the fact that a great painting has more commodity value than a great poem and equalized the situation. No one objected.

To modify one’s art is to modify one’s character. An artist whose work develops represents character growth, either slow and steady, like a garden, or in leaps…

The problem is to seize the glimpse.

The ethic lies in not making the glimpse presentable.

If one paints on an enormous scale, one gets involved in all the problems of running a lumberyard.

The beauty of Europe is that sculpture is everywhere. The sculpture doesn’t have to be great to function perfectly in the landscape, humanizing it.

America is what the poor people of Europe invented, given means enough and time. Europeans therefore shouldn’t snub it.

The only thing that I bought in Greece (1965) was a scale-model of a Homeric ship.

From my writings, it would seem that I am more interested in poetry than painting, which of course is not at all true. It is that the poets have speculated much more in words about what “the modern” is.

The interest in language so dominant in modern art is not an interest in semantics per se: it is a continual interest in making language (whatever the medium) to fit our real feelings better, and even to be able to express true feelings that had never been capable of expression before.

I love Hopkins’s insistence on particularization.

Barnett Newman for years has said that when he reads my writings he learns what I have been reading, but when he wants to know what I am really concerned with at a given moment, he looks at my pictures. He’s right.

To have the discipline to shut up, and just paint the pictures!

subject matter self

One of those poets who wouldn’t have a subject if she couldn’t write about herself.

stanza thus

A good stanza from almost any poem could stand alone as a poem.

cow of the world

There are lines for which a poet will not be forgotten, nor forgiven.

[Thinking of Richard Wilbur's "We milk the cow of the world...", from "Epistemology"]

language resources

Considering whether there is a hierarchy of language resources one can deploy in writing poetry: I think there are greater and lesser resources and then there are ones that rise and fall by the fashion of the times, and some that better serve the subjective predilections of this or that poet.

depleted lines

Long poems that aren’t narratives deplete themselves line by line.

make it better

If poets were allowed to publish only 100 pages of poetry every ten years, one wonders if the overall art might be lifted by such a constraint.

formatting f/x

The formatting looked advanced though the text was rather conventional.

resist the lapse

The best older poets resist the lapse into writing mainly about mortality and death.

energy to inertia

The energy of the poem came from line to line being non sequitur. After about a dozen such lines the effect became inertial.

terrible cumulative force

The well-known critic, poet, and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, in an essay included as part of [Walker] Evans’s American Photographs, the catalogue for the artist’s landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, indicated how his friend’s gift as a photographer was that he could single out the specific, the particular, so as to suggest a shared, but often otherwise unrecognized commonality. “The power of Evans’s work,” Kirstein wrote, “lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” If Evans could lay bare the truth in one person, he could point it out in, and consequently for, everyone.

—Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity (Viking – Penguin Random House, 2023)

one or many

Many series poems are little more than extended writing exercises. One or two poems could count for the many.

many lives

Poet, your personal history is just an iteration of millions of others.

read local hear local

Read poetry locally. Hear poetry locally.

do one thing well

Writers and artists who get stuck in a signature style.

poetry wants you

Poetry opens its arms to people society has trouble accepting.

extrusion publishing

No respect for a press that doesn’t protect its list.

world falls silent

No one really likes starlings.
For that reason alone, I continue
to savor them as they dip and dim
and vanish, taking with them
stemma, chrysalis, reticulate, telluric,
umbra, redolence, circumjacence,
and the verb perpend—each one
endangered, nearly extinct, desperate
for a mouth to roost in, for a tongue
that will relish the taste of its consonants
and vowels. What else might a word want?
A mind that respects what words mean.
Enough heart to know that within each
word left unsaid, a lost autochthonous
world falls silent. No assonance,
not even an echo. Each unused word an urn.

—Margaret Gibson, closing of the poem “Elegy, with Murmuration of Starlings,” Connecticut River Review, 2024

special case

Poetry is a special case of prose.

smug garde

He was part of the self-satisfied avant-garde.

i think therefore iamb

He was beginning to think in iambs or else he was starting to hear his pulse inside his head.

makes itself new

Unless the world stands still, poetry will change.

weak critic

A critic who only took on books by no-accounts so as not to offend any of the gatekeepers.

composition or content

There are people who keep commonplace books for their compositional and calligraphic beauty. Other people will scrawl over the pages or paste in clippings askew, concerned only with the quality of the content they’ve captured.

discursive control

He was a master of the meander poem.

no tail no donkey

…one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write—a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems—people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets—it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

—Randall Jarrell, from the brief essay “Bad Poets” (1953)

faux poems

Poet, if you don’t have anything to say—that’s okay. Just wait. Don’t fall for the faux poems that come from prompts.

bigger than us

Poetry is bigger than you or me and any of our predilections.

bad day for poets

It has been estimated that if Brooklyn suddenly slid into the Atlantic, the U.S. would lose 50% of its poets in a single catastrophic event.

young and beautiful

All the poets are getting younger and more beautiful.

mere description

I have always thought it was worth paying attention to actions or qualities routinely dismissed as mere when they appear in writing about art, literature, the world. Mere description, for instance, is in reality the most vexing thing to attempt when faced with any form of art, let alone aspect of reality.

—Brian Dillon, “Essay on Affinity II,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

only one-hundred

These days if you are familiar with the work of one-hundred contemporary poets you’re just getting started.

poem should

A poem should…

slow reveal

Even if a poet doesn’t tend to be autobiographical or confessional, inevitably some personal characteristics will be revealed in her/his choice of observations and in the style of writing.

severely selected

The kind of poet for whom a selected poems was invented.

no word in edgewise

The contemporary poetry scene can be summed up by the word "anecdoche."

in four lines

Often I’ve had the inclination to say, “I could write that poem in four lines.”

review work

It’s harder to review a book of poems than to write one.

secret secret

"A photograph is a secret about a secret."
—Diane Arbus

A poem is a secret about a secret.

mechanical blurbs

AI is the perfect tool for composing blurbs. Drop some positive adjectives into the hopper, turn the crank a couple times, and voila: a paragraph of hyperbole and effusive praise.

art or nature

I propose a simple distinction: a thing or something is either art or nature.

diva poet

I love much of Rilke, but he was a ‘diva’ in the negative sense of the word.

unmoved to making

I may be interested in a particular practice of making poetry without the least desire to practice that kind of making myself.

exhaustively empiricist

The Russian Formalists were at their best in their earlier, relatively informal texts: [Roman] Jakobson’s “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” for example, written in 1931 in response to Mayakovsky’s suicide, is surely one of the most profound texts ever written on how poetic strength can be dissipated and ultimately end in self-destruction. And Viktor Shklovsky’s famous discussion of ostranenie (making strange) and faktura (density) have become classics. Later Formalist works like Jakobson’s exhaustive analysis of the two versions of Yeats’ “The Sorrow of Love” (see “Linguistics and Poetics”) are perhaps less suggestive because they are exhaustively empiricist, the study counting such things as every instance of the article “the” and so on. Literary criticism, I would posit, will never be an exact science, and Jakobson was at his best when he did not try to give an exhaustive account of every part of speech or syllable count in a given poem.

—Marjorie Perloff, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (U. of Chicago Press, 2021)

monocular vision

Imagine a person wearing a monocle: the image of a bad critic with a single critical lens engaged on a work.

inert images

Images that don’t rise to the status of insight.

he can overdo you

When you think you’re overdoing it, read some Swinburne and accept your excess.

dead or alive

The articles that claim poetry is dead or in decline are counterbalanced by those touting that it’s thriving in our culture or reminding us how important poetry is to our lives.

unpoetic words

Those words you feel sorry for knowing they’ll never find a way into a poem. Then sometimes you are surprised when such a word shows up in a poem.

[See “tergiversations” from June Jordan’s “Poem for Haruko”]

value-add

The advent of AI will only add cachet to human-made works

poetry's way

“though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm.”

—Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)

splinter group

Poets are one of society’s splinter groups.

unexpected prose

The prose writer was dismayed that a poem could be made of prose.

against the stream

Poet, don’t go with the flow. Think of the stones in a stream, the way they impede and change the direction of the water. Make that a model for revision.

no account

The poems were words and phrases strung together but to no account and thus without interest.

no known poet

It can’t be explained but no one knows if s/he is a poet.

art and anarchy

...art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province of art. What was missing here, was something anarchistic in the air. I must modify that statement about art and anarchy. Art is only anarchy in juxtaposition with organized society. It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based. It is a benevolent anarchy: it must be that and if it is true art, it is. It is benevolent in the sense of constructing something which is missing, and what it constructs may be merely criticism of things as they exist.

—Tennessee Williams, “Something Wild,” Where I Live: Selected Essays (New Directions, 1978), edited by Christine B. Day and Bob Woods

plural difference

Its plural form can change a word quite a lot.

turn to language

Poetry was part of humankind’s turn to language, and therefore poetry will not end until humankind ends. Particularly in these times, we can imagine a depopulated earth with remnants of poetry spraypainted on walls, carved into stones, on metal plaques hanging tilted from buildings fallen into ruin.

is quantum

Language is quantum: changing states when observed (by reader or hearer).

long and longer still

There are some poems that refuse to be shortened.

always a refuge

Whatever poetry is or becomes, let it always be a refuge for beauty.

sad privilege of poetry

Athens is a holy name, but
There’s no trace of the gods.
Only Apollo...Apollo is a good tramp,
Now that his women are gone, he gets by
Selling knickknacks and pirates.
One evening at dusk
We noticed him, drunk, raving:
“If the harmony of the spheres ssshloows,
Wha kennai do? Wha kennai do?
Maybe a black cloud
That scolds the treacherous sky,
Or the herd that bleats for the fugitive shepherd?”
Ah, maybe this is the sad privilege
Of poetry, to die last.

—Fausto Melotti, Fausto Melotti (Editioni Charta, 2008), translation by Elene Geuna

against disgorgement

I’m against disgorgement art: lacking the sifting, selection and shaping that makes art engaging and compelling.