wordum wrixlan

Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan—to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric form in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse.

—Seth Lerer, “Caedmon Learns to Sing,” Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007)

political poetry

there is a truth behind the assertion that poetry and politics don't mix, but one so warped it turns on itself. The truth is that much of what is called political poetry...is hackwork. From this comes the generalization that politics destroys poetry. Yet isn't that an arbitrary conclusion? Most any kind of poetry is hackwork, is slipshod, undemanding of itself. The work of idle hands that are maybe not idle enough. When you come upon an inept love poem you aren't likely to conclude that love and poetry don't mix. You may think the poet a bad poet, or even a callow person. And you may pass judgment on the work. But you won't jump to generalizations about the incompatibility of love and poetry.

—James Scully's "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break (Bay Press, 1988)

rejection slip

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

—Samuel Johnson

misprint

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

—Oscar Wilde, “The Children of the Poets”

integrity

...the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet...is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened but with what happens.

—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Harcourt, 1963)

accuracy of observation

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

—Wallace Stevens

et in arcadia ego

and they shall read on the beautiful square monument
the inscription that chills my heart at all hours,
that makes me strangle so much sorrow in my breast.

—Jacopo Sannazano (1458-1530), Italian poet, Arcadia, 1502

Et in Arcadia ego: 'Even in Arcadia I am', this Latin phrase implies that death comes even in a place of great beauty and ease. The painting above, by Nicolas Poussin(1594–1665), is titled "Et in Arcadia ego."

permanently contemporary

Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

destiny of speech

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

language game

Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Zettel”

painters and poets

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

—Wallace Stevens, "Adagia," Opus Posthumous, p187

small and large

The briefest poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the entire creation.

—Josiah Royce (American philosopher, 1855 - 1916)

towering crag

The best line is a towering crag.
It won't be woven into an ordinary song.
The mind can't find a match for it
but casts about, unwilling to give up.

—Lu Ji, quoted in The Act of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters, (Shambala, 1996), translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

collide

Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
out of the doubt that fills my mind
I somehow find that you and I collide

—Howie Day, lyrics to "Collide"

ecstasy

If only I were able to live solely in ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body, redeeming each phrase with my days and weeks, infusing the poem with my breath for each word that has been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living.

—Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Talia Shalev

kintsugi

Kintsugi means "to patch with gold", this Japanese technique is thought to have begun in the late 15th century, after a shogun sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China to be fixed. It was returned held together with ugly metal staples, so Japanese craftsmen developed a way to repair the vessel by mending the cracks ornamentally.
    ♦ ♦ ♦

inner workings

Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.”

One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized.

—E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born (Arcade, 1998), translated by Richard Howard

common object

The common object is the sphinx, whose riddle the contemplative poet must solve.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

narcissism

We can put up with someone’s narcissism providing it makes interesting reading and it doesn’t run on too long.

–Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Ruins’ (review of Louise Glück’s Averno in NYRB)

poet's charge

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....

—Walt Whitman, from the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)

upstart crow

Nor must we forget, that, in his own life-time, Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but only Master William Shakespeare of the shrewd, thriving business firm of Condell, Shakespeare & Co., proprietors of the Globe Theater in London; and by a courtly author, of the name of Chettle, was hooted at, as an "upstart crow" beautfied "with other birds' feathers."

—Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850

body is

The body is the great poem.

—Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"

first time

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time.

—Dylan Thomas

not a parthenon

it is not the Parthenon
but a Vuillard small
as an Adam’s apple
where pain mounts and falls

—Frank O’Hara, Stones, 1957-60, a collaboration of lithographs by Larry Rivers & Frank O’Hara

at length

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

—Alfred Hitchcock

sympathetic magic

My present purpose is to attack estrangement…
    It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
    I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.

—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.

symbolic

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

—Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 40).

image to archetype

At its best, metaphor transforms the image into archetype--a deepening process—the transformational power of the ingeniously conceived and well-rendered metaphor. [JF]

silent poetry

Painting was called “silent poetry”; and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each are convertible into the laws of every other.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Art” (1841)

image

No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.
…
That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and must remain within the image or be annihilated.

—Antonin Artaud, “Manifesto in Clear Language”

silence

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
—Charles Simic

locked within

Michelangelo always tried to conceive the figure as lying hidden in the block of marble on which he was working. The task he set himself as a sculptor was merely to remove the stone which covered them.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1950

wild state

Poetry is something like religion in a wild state.
—Novalis

what is literature...

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

clarity

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

--

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms… But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1963

kinds of difficulty in poetry

Some Characteristics Of Unclear/Difficult/Obscure Poetry:

Purposefully Evading Understanding
The poem was not meant to be clear or to be understood in any conventional sense. Purposefully the poet has crafted something that can’t be parsed or comprehended.
It may have been out of fear that the reader would think the poet thin of mind, or it may be just that the poet resists the notion that poems should be knowable.

It's All There With Enough Time, Effort, And Will
It may take you several hours, days or weeks, years or a lifetime, but nothing in the poem is not stated or has been misexpressed in a way that it can never be comprehended or experienced fully. You might need a bigger dictionary or full encyclopedia set, or the ability to develop the emotional perspicacity of a Colette, but you can get there from here, eventually.

Merely Readerly Failure
The poem is reasonably clear and understandable if the various references and allusions made in the poem can be recognized and grasped. But they can‘t be: (a) Because you have different knowledge set or (b) you have a fairly low level of erudition. The latter is not elitism; it’s a fact that the more you’ve read and studied, the more you’re likely to understand. Some poets prefer to throw a wide net. Others are perfectly happy that only readers of a certain level of knowledge will gain entry to the poem’s fullest sense.

The Translation Or Transference Problem
The poem was perfectly clear in the poet’s mind, but, as rendered, most readers can’t understand it. A translation/transference problem occurred: words as ‘shabby equipment’, or the author’s inability to shape/make the kinds of sentences and language elements that would make the poem understandable across a wide & diverse group of readers

Mimesis Doesn’t Mean Clear
Mimesis of the chaotic or confused: The world is chaotic, life is disorderly and imperfectly understood by the human mind, therefore the poem can or must mirror that disorder and chaos. The jigsaw puzzle spilled, with no attempt made to organize and piece it together.

Pushing Language To Its Limits
With a vast vocabulary and syntactical inventiveness, the poet uses the language in a way that is often hard to follow, difficult to parse or make sense of. Maybe the poet has pulled out all the stops or is pushing the language envelope, so to speak. Think Hart Crane or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or the way Wallace Stevens feels his way through a poem by thinking based more on sound than sense. Ordinary words can be apt neologisms in the hands of certain poets. Gertrude Stein pressing ordinary rhetoric into the ‘surrhetorical’.

The Attraction Of The Fragmentary And Disjunctive
The aphoristic and imagistic attractiveness of certain sentences and phrases are undeniable. So much so that some poets are content to string these elements together or to splatter them about a page and just let them do what they may in the mind of the reader. Sometimes it’s just enjoyable to cut things up, to collage. To revel in the kaleidoscopic or the ‘kaleidosonic’: the slamdance of words and syllables. To break sentences unexpectedly, to leave the reader hanging on a ledge of words, to practice legerdemain with language.

It’s Ineffable Or Just Too Complicated
The difficulty/obscurity of the subject matter or the psychological state that impelled the poem makes the poem difficult/obscure. The writer intended to be clearer but couldn’t manage it and perhaps no writer will ever be capable of capturing the meaning/essence of ‘it’ in words. The experience is real but ineffable. The emotionally driven lyric flight, or the speaker surrendering to a language rending state that may verge on glossalalia, hysteria, or a speaking in tongues. Or, in fact, the subject matter is too large in scope and too multi-faceted or too deeply layered to ever be captured in language or in the space of a single poem or even a sequence of poems. Think of the poem of America that Whitman almost managed to write.

One Or More Possible Readings
The poem is composed in such a way that perfectly good readers will come away with vastly divergent notions of what the poem is about or trying to get at. No one reading is correct; all readings represent valid interpretations and experiences of the poem. The composition may have been intentionally constructed to expose multiple facets and interpretative aspects. Or it just came out that way. Once the poem enters the public domain, whether the poet intended this is somewhat beside the point; though the poet has a right to be disappointed if his/her preferred interpretation wasn’t carried over to the reader (which is related to translation/transference problem).

Calling Attention To The Materiality of Language
The poem is meant to be an experience of perception, rather than to be understood. The experience being on the level of the materiality of language (sound, alphabetic construct, shape, etc., being foregrounded) and consciously not employing the communicative elements that language offers. Sound poetry, pure poetry, certain forms of language poetry. Of course, many readers may experience it in many ways, which is generally not seen as a deficiency but as an opportunity.

[JF]

horde of destructions

Pablo Picasso said that a painting was "une somme de destructions."

Wallace Stevens in “The Main With The Blue Guitar,” translated this to mean "a horde of destructions":

    Is this picture of Picasso’s, this "horde
    Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,

    Now an image of society?

(source check; possibly an essay at poets.org)

communication

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

—T.S. Eliot, "Dante"

amateur

The word “amateur” (from the Latin root amator meaning ‘lover’) means someone who takes great pleasure in his/her field or pursuit.

simplicity

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.

—William H. Gass, Finding A Form

remarks

The only salvation for the systematic mind is the spontaneous random remark which is not to be further pursued but which also must not declare itself as a Law.

—Elias Canetti, Notes and Notations, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann (Noonday Press, FSG, 1994)

magic latern

The image is the magic lantern which lights up the poets in their darkness. But images aren’t alone. There are passages between them which also must be poetry.

—Jules Supervielle,”Thinking About a Poetics” Mid-Century French Poets, edited by Wallace Fowlie Grove Press, 1955)

forgetfulness

“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus, 275a-b)

musical thought

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

— Thomas Carlyle, “Heroes and Hero Worship”

translation

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The next thing to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. II, Chap. 3

bad blurbs

A pity, but I couldn’t bear to go back into these pages even to save my favorite bookmark.
--
I noticed there was a bookplate inside the front cover, and under ‘ex libris’ someone had hastily scrawled ‘Anonymous’.
--
May I suggest that not all books need to be printed on acid-free paper.
--
I can easily imagine finding this book at a library book sale stamped ‘WITHDRAWN’.
--
It’s not a good sign that even prison libraries are refusing donated copies of the book.
--
In poetry the less said the better.
--
Leaving the bookstore that slight pang of buyer’s remorse I felt after spending $24.99 was nothing compared to the full-blown reader’s despair I suffered once I got home.
--
It’s often said that poetry is impossible to translate. In this case any translation would trigger an international incident.
--
I found my mind flashing on scenes from Fahrenheit 451…it was a real ‘page-burner’.
--
Being blind wouldn’t be so bad. At least in Braille my fingertips would have gotten a nice massage if nothing else from this book.

necessary fallows

Any time I’m not writing (which of course means most of the time) finding my way to a new poem feels entirely impossible. There have been many times in my life when I’ve gone months without writing. This happens frequently enough that I’ve come to think of them as necessary fallows, from which I often emerge with an altered set of poetic energies.

—Jane Hirshfield, MiPoesias interview (2005)

What is a poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd around the poet and say to him, "Sing for us soon again"—which is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music, is delightful.

—Søren Kierkegaard, "Either/Or"