contra beckett

Fail better? No, poet, fail more beautifully.

curse of verse

Formal poems that put perfection of form above poetic essence, fail as poems.

offer and payoff

The sonnet works by offering a promise (or hook) in the first 8 to 10 lines, and then immediately giving the reader the payoff.

fool's golden age

Now matter the glow, it’s always an iron pyrite age.

too beautiful to understand

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

—Carl Sandburg, from the poem "Manitoba Childe Roland"

splutter poem

So much going on verbally, you’re gonna need a bib to read this poem aloud.

write your own

You realize you haven’t lived the life to write that poem, but that’s no reason not to write your own.

[after reading a Jack Gilbert poem]

a long list

Make a list of all the antisemite artists and writers. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

[David Markson in one of his 'non-novels' called out very many artists and writers for their antisemitism.]

only a footnote

He wrote the kind of poetry that would never accrete any lasting acclaim but might hang on for a time as a footnote.

beach reads

There are poetry books too that make for good beach reading.

same times

The feet at which I have before or after sat include those of Heidegger, Coué, Bertrand Russell, Charles Péguy, C.S. Lewis, Whately Carrington, Charles Williams, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, Kenneth Burke, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Fr. [Martin Cyril] D’Arcy, Professor [Herbert] Butterfield, Gerald Heard, J.B. Priestley, J.-P. Sartre and others too numinous to mention at random. Few men can know more than I have been told about the Contemporary Crisis, the Modern Malaise, the Present Predicament, or the Dilemma of Today. None of these things (sometimes I suspect they may all be one) seems to differ radically from the problems with which, say, Ecclesiasticus, Montaigne or Leopardi was confronted.

—Daniel George, Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954)

to the brim

Think of the last line as a brim not to breach. Or a brim that overflows only in the reader's mind.

uneasy at rest

A poem is uneasy even at rest.

abandonment issues

Make a list of all the artists who abandoned their spouses and children. No, don’t bother, it would be too long.

final lines

Poet, write the poem as though it will be your last.

much worse than that

A poem that had to get much worse before it could be made any better.

distillate

The poem as distilled prose.

chaotic reader

This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
[...]
There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry—but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything,” A Defense of Ardor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

revision of a kind

In making erasure/blackout poems, poets seldom turn to their own texts, but perhaps they should.

impossible to answer

Can the emotion I need to express be found in language alone?

published poet

It’s possible to publish a great deal of poetry without being a poet.

really funny

Poet, don’t be a wannabe comedian.

tested by the times

So many canonical poems that would be cut down in a workshop these days.

hard work with words

If the novelist seeks the mot propre, how much more so the poet. His words are isolated, arranged in a metrical pattern, where not only the value, or values, of each single word must be considered, but also the close interdependence of one upon the other: for every word is quick to take colour from its companion, and will gain or lose in emphasis according to its position in the line. The adjustment is very delicate, the labour painful. A lyric by Wordsworth dances gaily enough: yet that stolid figure would first pace for many days up and down the back garden, "humming and booing about", and scattering scraps of paper as he went.

—George H W Rylands, Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928)

weighed down

Poet, let the words weigh heavy.

speak your truth

Confessionalism at its best is speaking your truth.

old new borrowed blue

For a wedding they say it’s good luck for the bride to wear ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. This could be the model for a good poetry reading: Read something old, read something new, read something borrowed (the generous act of reading another poet’s poem), and the blue will be evident in the reading because it’s poetry.

telling cover

There was a time in poetry publishing when you couldn’t just judge a book by its cover. Now it’s okay—no need to break open the book to read a poem or two before passing judgement.

obviously magnificent

You can’t explain the poem: you can’t say what it’s about, you can’t even make a claim for it as a poem, yet it manifests itself in the space of the page and declares itself magnificent.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

pulled out stops

A poem unimpeded by punctuation.

[Thinking of W.S. Merwin]

style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

one and many

A poem should not be overly varied but poetry should be various in order not to bore us.

poem as brick

A poem made from mutable clay of human existence but solid as brick.

hard to read

Your layout didn’t improve the poem but it was successful in making it harder to read.

what they don't say

Gamblers don’t talk about their losses and poets don’t talk about their rejections.

to declare or to disclose

Too many poems declare themselves outright when a slow disclosure would be more effective.

living things

Another poetic requirement, necessary to emphasize since reading and writing became almost universal throughout the English-speaking area fifty years ago, is that every word must be given its full meaning. In commercial, scientific, and newspaper prose there is an increasing tendency to use words as mere counters, stripping them of their history and force and associations—as one might use a box of old foreign coins in a card game without regard for their date, country, face-value or intrinsic value. The creative side of poetry consists of treating words as if they were living things—in coupling them and making them breed new life.

—Robert Graves, “Preface to a Reading of Poems,” Food for the Centaurs (Doubleday, 1960)

person or the poetry

It’s the editor’s dilemma: The feeling that you’re not judging the poetry but the poet’s life.

prose poem test

The prose poem is the true test of a poem: Could the piece be unlineated and still be a good poem.

mind to paper

One of those poems of the mind that evaporates on paper.

my life

So many poets who think their life stories are important.

locates in space

Like a bat, the poem echolocates in space.

capitalism's mouthpiece

A post-mo poem that capitulates to capitalism at every turn with a product placement or brand name.

poet's grave

[Scene takes place at a ruined monastery that has been turned into a prison camp]

     From all others, Yakov Petrovich Polonsky chose this place as his own and gave instructions that he was to be buried here. Man, it seems, has always been prone to the belief that his spirit will hover over his grave and gaze down on the peaceful countryside around it.
     But the domed churches have gone; the half of the stone walls that is left has been made up in height by a plank fence with barbed wire, and the whole of this ancient place is dominated by those sickeningly familiar monsters: watchtowers. There is a guardhouse in the monastery gateway, and a poster that says, “Peace among Nations,” with a Russian workman holding a little black girl in his arms.
[…, speaking to the warder]
     “Tell me—according to the map, there’s a poet called Polonsky buried here. Where is his grave?”
     “You can’t see Polonsky. He’s inside the perimeter.”
     So Polonsky was out of bounds. What else was there to see? A crumbling ruin? Wait, though—the warder was turning to his wife: “Didn’t they dig Polonsky up?”
     “Mm. Took him to Ryazan.” The woman nodded from the porch as she cracked sunflower seeds with her teeth.
     The warder thought this was a great joke: “Seems he’d done his time—so they let him out . . .”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Ashes of a Poet,” Stories and Prose Poems (FSG, 1971), translated by Michael Glenny, p. 249

that kind of title

The kind of title that whatever words fell out from it, would fall into place.

subject suspect

Subject matter matters more than most poets allow.

off message

Unlike politicians, poets never stay on message.

burst of history

Poems burst forth with their history.

signs and wonders

Mostly a poem is signs and wonders.

language preceding language

One of [Dada’s] founders, the German poet Hugo Ball tells how, on June 23, 1916, in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, hiding his face behind a mask by Hans Arp, he recited, to the astonishment, indignation, and fascination of the audience, a phonetic poem consisting entirely of nonsense syllables and meaningless words. Ball’s experience, as he himself recounts it, lucidly and with feeling bordering on religious trance; it was a regression to the magic spell, or more precisely, to a language preceding language: “With those poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism. We returned to the profound alchemy of the Word, beyond words, thus preserving poetry within its last sacred domain.”

—Octavio Paz, "Reading and Contemplation," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

sounds found a way

The sounds found a way to move the poem forward.

winged lines

If a writer is to avoid oblivion and to live on, it will be on the wings of quote marks.

no sleep

The poet will not let you sleep.

mad meantime

In a perfect world no political poetry would be written. In the mad meantime, we must ‘write’ the wrongs.

attention to the overlooked

It was said of her that she paid attention to the overlooked things.

not really imperfect

…Japanese poets and painters might say with Yves Bonnefoy: imperfection is the acme of achievement. The imperfection, as has been noted, is not really imperfect: it is a voluntary act of leaving unfinished. Its true name is awareness of the fragility and precariousness of existence, an awareness of that which knows itself to be suspended between one abyss and another. Japanese art, in its most tense and transparent moments, reveals to us those instants—because each is only that, an instant—of perfect equilibrium between life and death. Vivacity: mortality.

—Octavio Paz, "The Tradition of the Haiku," Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), translation by Helen Lane

faster round and round

The poem was a whirlpool of circumlocution.

first river to cross

Your first line should be your Rubicon.

wild encounter

I’ll pay attention when I’m startled by a poem of yours that I've encountered in the wild.

slow to disclose

A poem should not immediately disclose itself as a poem.

rounded-upon-itself

What sort of a poet can this be, who is ‘traditional’ and ‘yet has no poetic forerunners’? We solve this riddle by saying that in his techniques Mandelstam was indeed unprecedented, yet the techniques were made to serve a form—why not say simply, a beauty?—that rejoiced in calling upon every precedent one might think of, from Homer to Ovid, to the builders of Santa Sophia, to Dante and Ariosto and Racine. For it is true, surely: the sort of form to which Mandelstam vows himself alike in nature and in art, the form of the bent-in and the rounded-upon-itself, is the most ancient and constant of all European understandings of the beautiful—it is what long ago recognised in the circle the image of perfection.

—Donald Davie, foreword to Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Press, 1989), translated by James Greene

first poet

The moon was the earth’s first poet.

no library card

He would go to the library to write and to read books, but he wouldn’t check any of them out—wouldn’t take them home—where he had too many books to read in one lifetime.

too fast to last

Haste is the enemy of important art.

filmic language

The poem as film made language.

is foundation

When you reach the last line you should feel it as foundation for the whole poem.

questions without answers

I have sat through many Q & A’s after poetry readings and have always been bored. I am against Q & A’s; I believe the poetry audience should be allowed to sit with the feelings and imaginings evoked by the poetry itself, should go home with them, and let them nourish their dream life.

—Doug Anderson, essay “In Praise of Aporia,” published in Plume #164 April 2025 plumepoetry.com

forgive them

Forgive them, for they know not what they write.

poem eater

An image can eat a whole poem.

taught right

Been lucky not to have been taught by teachers without their own ideas.

rope-ladder

To read a good poem is like climbing down a rope-ladder, line by line never sure there is another length below you that can hold you, and not sure it reaches all the way to the ground.

two kinds of reaching

Here are…two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes–with strength of expression and skill and luck–reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.

—Muriel Rukeyser, from her Preface to The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw-Hill, 1978)

siblings

Force and form are close kin.