perfectly cracked

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything—
that's how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen, from “Anthem”

unsettle the suburbs

We are creatures of habit; given a blank we can’t help trying to fill it in along lines of customary seeing and saying. But the best poetic lines undermine those habits, break the pre- off the –dictable, unsettle the suburbs of your routine sentiments, and rattle the tracks of your trains of thought.

—Heather McHugh, “Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination” Poets Teaching Poets (U. of Michigan, 1996), edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen B. Voigt

song and charge

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made...

—W.B. Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben"

long view

For when persons coming from different pursuits, lives, interests, ages and walks of literature have all alike on the same matters the same view, then this consensus of discordant elements assumes the character of a “judgement,’ and the weight of conviction it brings to bear on the admired passage becomes powerful and indisputable.

—Longinus, “On the Sublime”

ugly punctuation

No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.

—Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (Norton, 1979)

not innocent

Great poems are innocent of neither ideas nor technique. But poetry which becomes ideas or techniques has diluted to the danger point the process of poetry. As a poet advances in sophistication and technique, this danger dogs him.

—Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing (The Library of Congress lecture, undated pamphlet)

soap-bubble line

Think your sentences before you write them; otherwise they are like the continuous bumps of bubbly soap that used to be left in the bowl instead of becoming the iridescent globes desired by the pipes of our childhood. A line of poetry is an iridescent soap-bubble.

(March 1, 1949, Letters to Marcel Béalu)

—Max Jacob, Hesitant Fire (U. of Nebraska Press, 1991), selected prose of Max Jacob, translated and edited by Moishe Black and Maria Green

not poet

Every poet must, I think, feel a bit uneasy when receiving honours, because he knows that like the label poet itself—even more so—they have nothing to do with being a poet and writing poetry. A poet is only a poet when he is writing poetry, and when his is writing poetry least of all does he know that he is a poet. In fact, usually the attempt to write poetry makes him painfully aware that he isn’t.

—Stephen Spender, Chaos and Control in Poetry (The Library of Congress, pamphlet, 1966)

metre-making argument

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

list making

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

poetic ear

Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.

—George Seferis, On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966) translation by Rex Warner

continuing on

Poetry is about continuing poetry.

—Joanne Kyger, ABOUT NOW: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1997, p. 631)

only two creators

Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.

[Only God and the Poet deserve the name Creator.]

—Torquato Tasso

against style

There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style.

—Archibald MacLeish, from the poem "Invocation to the Social Muse"

breathing in

inspiration
c.1300, "immediate influence of God or a god," especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiracion "inhaling, breathing in; inspiration," from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), noun of action from pp. stem of L. inspirare "inspire, inflame, blow into," from in- "in" (see in- (2)) + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit). Literal sense "act of inhaling" attested in English from 1560s.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary.

should be an event

[Eliot writes in a letter to J.H. Woods, his former professor at Harvard.]

My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.

—T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (vol. I, Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285), edited by Valerie Eliot.

new image, new world

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images live directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, p. 47)

feeling for fragment

Our feeling for fragment as form is an explanation of free verse.

—J.V. Cunningham
(Quote comes from the class notes recorded by D.G. Myers in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar taught by J.V. Cunninghan in 1976.)

ambiguous style

In a recording of Robert Lowell reading of his poem “Skunk Hour,” Lowell makes the comment that “…my old friend John Berryman, the late John Berryman, said that the skunks were a catatonic vision of frozen terror. But Dick Wilbur said they were cheerful emanations of nature. That’s the advantage of writing in an ambiguous style.”

same drawing, same poem

I have made this drawing several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

I have made this poem several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.