sad parade

Poets and social media: a parade of narcissistic self-promotion.

poets refuse

Poets refuse to be discouraged.

poesy not poetry

Some poets are still writing ‘poesy’, not poetry.

one and done

The saddest thing I could say about the poet was that no poem of his/hers I’d read impelled me to read it again.

what words are

The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas, but they express at the same time qualities which are not translatable into concepts—just as a melody which, though it may be associated with a conceptual meaning, cannot be described by words or by any other medium of expression. And it is just that irrational quality which stirs up our deepest feelings, elevates our innermost being, and makes it vibrate with others.

The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined therewith. It is stronger than what the words convey objectively—stronger even than reason with all its logic, in which we believe so firmly...

If art can be called the re-creation and formal expression of reality through the medium of human experience, then the creation of language may be called the greatest achievement of art. Each word originally was a focus of energies, in which the transformation of reality into the vibrations of the human voicethe&mash;vital expression of the human soul—took place.

—Lama Angarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (Rider & Co., 1960), no translator given

few wins

One wishes more poets took to heart the Latin motto: "Non multa sed bona," not many, but good.

shadow workforce

America doesn’t know how many really good poets it has, doing fine work in the shadows, without public attention.

published poet

When someone refers to themselves as a ‘published poet’, their writing is likely at a very low level.

rough going

A gritty poetics.

burned library

Such was his erudition that when he died it felt like a great library had burned.

[Thinking of Borges]

let's get lost

From the start of this poem you could hear Chet singing from the backseat, Let’s Get Lost…

drawn to poetry

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

—George Sand, The Devil's Pool (1846)

first to last

From the first line you couldn’t have foreseen the last.

innovative v. novel

Is the work innovative, an improvement of the art, or merely novel, different in a way that makes little difference to the art?

stay cool

Poet, learn to make no great claim.

break felt

Let the line break where it may, where it wants to break.

cards play themselves

That last line, lay it down like a full house or straight flush.

least made first

Their art so undervalued, poets act as though the world can’t do without their work.

higher speech

A poet of resplendent rhetoric.

[Thinking of Wallace Stevens]

flowers are few

Much that charms is small and fleeting
To the greatness of eternity.
The earth is a tiny shadow tottering on the edge of death;
The moon is a throb of splendor in the heart of the night;
And the stars are ephemera in the long gaze of God.
So grieve not
That your poems are the cool, fresh grass of a short summer;
The flowers are few.

—Pascal D’Angelo, last eight lines of “To Some Modern Poets,” Of Clouds and Mists: The Collected Poems (Sublunary Editions, 2024), with an introduction and Notes by Dennis Barone

different kinds of poets

There are poets who make poems and poets who receive and record them.

situational awareness

A poet should have the observational skills of a Jason Bourne.

recalling past voices

A poem…has the power to remind poet and reader alike of things they have read and heard. Also—and this is partly why the subject is so complex—it has the power to remind them of things that they have not read and heard, but that have been read and heard by others whom they have read and heard.

Thus the art, so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence. This has been no more memorably stated than in Spencer’s apostrophe to Chaucer in Book 4 of The Faeire Queene:

            through infusion sweet
     Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive,
     I follow here the footing of thy feet.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written. As a new poem is made, not only with the art but within it, past voices are convoked—to be changed, little or much, by the addition of another voice.

—Wendell Berry, “The Responsibility of the Poet,” What Are People For: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990)

all of a piece

He wrote the same poem in a thousand versions.

book before horse

Poets more concerned over publications than whether they’re read.

filled out the form

The worse kind of poem is one that wouldn’t exist except to fill out a form.

more is bore

Some poets write two or more poems of the same type or theme within one poem.

don't abide

Hard to abide poets who abide only one kind of poetry.

markson notes

Because Theodore Roosevelt’s son was enamored with the poetry of E.A. Robinson, then President Roosevelt arranged for Robinson, who was destitute at the time, a job at the New York Customs House. A sinecure that allowed Robinson the means and the time to compose his verses.

Knowing that T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, visitors looking for his childhood home are surprised to find only a parking lot where the row house had been on Locust Street: The Waste Land.

Franz Kafka finished his story “A Hunger Artist” while dying from starvation due to complications caused by laryngeal tuberculosis.

bang-bang

Poet, bang it out.

signal plus noise

From the standpoint of information theory, poetry may contain a good deal of ‘noise’ but in the case of poetry it’s not extraneous to the signal.

not point at all

The scientist [Robert Hooke] turns next to “a point commonly so called, that is, the mark of a full-stop, or period.” Whether printed or made with a pen, the tiny point, circle or dot of the period turns out to be disfigured, ragged, deformed. Under the lens, this microdot looks as though it’s been made with a burnt stick on an uneven floor.

—Brian Dillon, “What Pitiful Bungling Scribbles and Scrawls,” Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review of Books, 2023)

metaphoric power

The metaphor draws its strength from ever more disparate elements being joined until the difference becomes too great and the power of the metaphor dissipates. Of course the tolerance for disparity depends on the particular reader.

inflated till it pops

His reviews were inflated blurbs, to the point that reading to the end of one you began to wince, sure it was about to burst in your face.

violent forgetting

I notice where a page has been torn out of my notebook and this feels like a violent forgetting.

limited love

They claim to love poetry but can’t name more than a handful of poems beyond their own.

markson notes

Of the many languages that arose among humankind over the centuries, most never developed a written form.

It’s been estimated that Sappho wrote about 10,000 lines of poetry, but only 600 lines or so remain, many just single words on papyri fragments. Whole scrolls of Sappho’s poetry were lost to the fire that destroyed the library at Alexandria in 48 BCE.

“View du Boulevard du Temple” (1838) by Louis Daguerre is thought to be the first photograph wherein a living person is present. A small dark figure on the street in the early morning appears to be getting his boots polished. The person doing the polishing is obscured by the blur of the motions he was making during the long exposure, and by his lower station in life.

counter productive

Your hype is not helping your art.

be oblique

The poetic line may run straight across the page and be oblique at the same time.

knows more

The poet knows more about the poem than the poem shows.

don't go there

Poet, don’t dare to call the clouds flocculent.

content and container

Weigh and measure your content, then find or mold the container.

make it move

New or not, it must move me.

small change

He was a poet and so he could always dig into his pockets for a few more words.

floor to ceiling

The beauty of a good bookshop filled floor to ceiling with loaded shelves, or any well-stocked library for that matter, is that you feel here is a place equal to the mind, housing and holding the known and making available the unknown of this world.

stutter on

But every poem is no more than a stutter
beneath the endless stutter of the stars.

—Roberto Juarroz, Vertical Poetry: Last Poems (White Pine Press, 2011), translation by Mary Crow

nothing but

A nothing poem made of nothing but words.

bridge too far

He wanted to review poetry books but couldn’t imagine reading a bad one to the last line.

writer reader reviewer

It’s easier to write poetry than to be a reader, and harder yet to be a reviewer.

first stroke

First line: first brushstroke on a blank canvas.

fly in the web

I can draw a web of connections around any poem.

rhythm of my imagination

At that time, I knew only that free verse was ill-suited to my spirit….But I lacked faith in traditional meters….And besides I had parodied them too often to take them seriously now….I knew of course that traditional meters don’t exist in any absolute sense, but are remade according to the interior rhythms of each poet’s imagination. And one day, I found myself muttering a certain jumble of words (which turned into a pair of lines from “South Seas”) in a pronounced cadence that I had used for emphasis ever since I was a child, when I would murmur over and over the phrases that obsessed me most in the novels I was reading. That’s how, without know it, I found my verse, which was of course for “South Seas” and several other poems as well, wholly instinctive….Gradually I discovered the intrinsic laws of this meter…, but I was always careful not to let it tyrannize me and was ready to accept, when it seemed necessary, other stress patterns and line lengths. But I never again strayed far from my scheme, which I consider the rhythm of my imagination.

—Cesare Pavese, from Pavese’s essay “The Poet’s Craft,” quoted by Geoffrey Brock in the introduction to his translations of Cesare Pavese in Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon, 2002)

not me

If a poem writes itself, do I have a plausible alibi?

go slow

Reading poetry is slow reading.

demotic speech

If poetry had not turned to demotic speech after Modernism, after Beat, after New American Poetry, etc., it would have become like a collection of antique music boxes that are only wound from time to time to keep the springs in good working order.

talk it up

Blurbs and other forms of rodomontade...

"No industry [film industry] did more to destroy the meaning of words. The follies are too familiar to need laboring here—how the story of a couple of cowboys quarreling over a girl became an epic, the tale of a small-time 'hoofer' a deathless saga. Colossal, terrific, stupendous—these words became the small change of film advertising. A reservation was put on a whole series of other adjectives like throbbing, rending, tingling, pulsating, pounding, sizzling, scorching, stark, elemental, volcanic, and searing. No story was ever taken from life—it was ripped or torn from the mighty canvas of humanity."

—E.S. Turner, The Shocking History of Advertising! (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1953)

bad poet good person

When you are the organizer of a reading series, inevitably someone who is a terrible poet but a very nice person will ask to be a featured reader (often touting a self-published book)—and there is no good way of saying no.

runover words

He had a funny habit of placing a line break so that the words starting the next line would be shown to be superfluous.

loose thread

Like a loose thread in a beautiful garment, an odd unwound line can alter and awaken one’s reading of the poem.

repeated beat-down

Any poem that uses the same repeated word or phrase past a page’s length is trying to shut down the reader’s mind.

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"]