world within

[re: the Alexandrian poets]

If one lives and works in a superb modern university that is lavishly funded by the omnipotent and uniformly benevolent emperor, what does one write about? The answer is, clearly: what one writes about is far less important than how well one writes. For such a sensibility as this, the objects of mimesis of less fortunate writers are bound to seem a sad by-product of their misfortune, even as the perfection of one's own style and the consummate refinements of one's own technique might well seem to outsiders merely the offshoots of one's own great good luck. And if such outsiders, having looked at this pure and perfect art, should decide that it was wholly artificial, that it lacked any vestige of power or commitment, that it was sterile, suspiciously delicate, narcissistic, overripe? Well, what is there to say to a barbarian? And if one's life is in fact meaningless and if existence is pointless, if the emperor should fall from his parade horse or choke on a fishbone and the bad times rush back, sweep through the boulevards, burn down the library? Idle, foolish, neurotic thoughts. There is no danger here, even if there were, it would somehow be unreal, for even if one's life should prove to be pointless, one's art is not. (p. 99)

—W. R. Johnson, “In the Birdcage of the Muses,” The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (U. of California Press, 1982)

lyric bauble

Sometimes a poet becomes so completely absorbed in the lyrical possibilities of certain combinations of sounds that he forgets what he started out to say, if anything, and here again a nasty tangle results. This type of obscurity is one which I have great sympathy for: I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem, a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble—a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.

—E. B. White, “Unzip the Veil,” One Man's Meat, p146

phenomenon of becoming

Form is not static but a phenomenon of becoming.

—Jean Ladrière (Belgian philosopher), quote encountered at Lee Ufan's retrospective show Marking Infinity at the Guggenheim Museum in October 2011.

actualist

I’m not a realist but an actualist. I set down nothing that hasn’t…to my knowledge actually happened in words and tones I have actually heard.

—Robert Frost, The Notebooks of Robert Frost (Belknap Press, Harvard UP, 2007), edited by Robert Faggen

an and, and then another

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”

erotic image

The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with.

—Octavio Paz, "The Double Flame"

astonished to finish

I am always astonished when I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me until I get started. But I distract myself and do it. What I achieve is a product in me, not by applying my will but by giving into it. I begin because I'm not motivated to think; I conclude because I haven't the nerve to leave off. The book is my act of cowardice.

—Fernando Pessoa, "Always Astonished: A Journal," Always Astonished: Selected Prose (City Lights Books, 1988), translated by Edwin Honig

starts here ends there

A successful poem starts in one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.

—Randall Jarrell,“Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry”

cat about the house

A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.

—Allen Grossman

[Often cited as: "Art is about something the way a cat is about the house."]

get it right

Poetry is getting something right in language.

Howard Nemerov, “Poetry and Meaning,” A Howard Nemerov Reader (Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p281)

at the heart of things

The image is the essential poem at the heart of things.

—C.G. Jung

more primitive than prose

Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has; while prose is a cultured interior thing, prose is of the house, where lamplight abolishes even the tides of day and night, and human caprice rules. The brain can make prose; the whole man, brain and nerves, muscles and entrails, organs of sense and of generation, makes poetry and responds to poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Preface" (June 1922)

best word order

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, 'prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order'

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1 (1885), collected by Henry Nelson Coleridge.

bar talk

It appears from many rejections that I do not write poetry at all. Or as a dear friend told me the other day: "You do not understand the true meaning of poetry. You are not lyrical. You do not sing! You write bar talk. The type of thing you write I can hear in a bar on any day."

—Charles Bukowski, in a letter to Jon Webb, one of his early publishers.

untruthful town

The poem is always your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time. At home, not only do you know that the movie house wasn’t always there, or that the grocer is a newcomer who took over after the former grocer committed suicide, you have complicated emotional responses that defy sorting out. With the strange town, you can assume all knowns are stable, and you owe the details nothing emotionally…Though you have never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life. You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can’t understand, you feel is your town. In some mysterious way that you need not and probably won’t understand, the relationship is built on fragments of information that are fixed—and if you need knowns that the town does not provide, no trivial concerns such as loyalty to truth, a nagging consideration had you stayed home, stand in the way of your introducing them as needed by the poem. It is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk, Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem.

—Richard Hugo, “The Triggering Town,” The Triggering Town (Norton, 1979)

not easy to write badly

To write as badly as Wordsworth is not easy. Even for Wordsworth it was a difficult as when Wordsworth was writing well.

—William Gass, Habitations of the Word (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997, p 120)

art of non-words

About a secret of poetry: It has been said that poetry is an art of words. But poetry is an art of words only to the extent to which it is also an art of non-words; indeed, silence ought to be omnipresent in poetry, very much as death is forever present in life.

—Lucian Blaga, from The Élan of the Island, 1946. (Translated by ANDREI BANTAÛ.)

pawn e4

If poetry reaches the point which chess has reached, where the decisive, profound, and elegant combinations lie within the scope only of masters, and are appreciable only to competent and trained players, that will seem to many people a sorry state of affairs, and to some people a consequence simply of the sinfulness of poets; but it will not in the least mean that poetry is, as they say, dead; rather the reverse. It is when poetry becomes altogether too easy, too accessible, runs down to a few derivative formulae and caters to low tastes and lazy minds—it is then that the life of the art is in danger.

—Howard Nemerov, "The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry,” Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (Rutgers University Press, 1972)

to get it right

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” Opus Posthumous (Vintage, 1990, p. 201)

the thousand lines

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand,' which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. 'Sufflaminandus erat,' as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him: 'Caesar, thou dost me wrong.' He replied: 'Caesar did never wrong but with just cause;' and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

—Ben Jonson, Timber: Or, Discoveries (1630)

poem to poem

Poems, I am saying, are neither about 'subjects' nor about 'themselves.' They are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent.

—Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford Univ. Press, 1975)

remotest discoveries

The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any on which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us...

—William Wordsworth, preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads

command of metaphor

It is a great matter to observe propriety in these several modes of expression, as also in compound words, strange (or rare) words, and so forth. But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

—Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, Section III, Part XXII

advertencies of verse

All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched. Its lines insistently defy their own medium by averting themselves from the space available, affording the absent its say, not only at the poem’s outset and end by at each line’s outset and end. Richard Howard’s deft maxim (“prose proceeds, verse reverses”) catches the shifts in directionality implicit in the advertencies of verse. It means to aim at (as its means are) the untoward.

A composed verse is a record of the meeting of the line and sentence, the advertent and the inadvertent: a succession of good turns done. The poem is not only a piece, like other pieces of art; it is a piece full of pieces.

Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1993)

poem or life

one does not begin a poem, one abandons one's life

—Mark Leidner, The Angel in The Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011)

cranial uplift

If I read a book it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.

—Emily Dickinson (quoted by Higginson, Aug. 16, 1870, Letters, Vol. II, 473)

poetry or prose

What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.

—Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Random House, 1935, 209)

village explainer

He [Ezra Pound] was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

—Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Harcourt Brace, NY, 1933. p. 246)

tears on the pages

Around 1000 A.D., when the Magyars were being converted over to
    Christianity, Magyar children were forced to attend school for the first
    time in their cultural history: "therefore the Magyar word konyv means
    tears as well as book."

—Albert Goldbarth, from “Library,” Saving Lives (Ohio State U. Press, 2001)

last possible domain

[Poetry] is the last possible domain in which we could preserve by language what we commonly deem to be reliable cognitive commonplaces, and last to appeal to solid, everyday perceptions. Poetry does not seek to negate these props. But it uncovers the oppressions of naïve experience and the stale pool of confirming constancies.

—Justus Buchler, The Main of Light (Oxford Univ. Press, 1974, p. 49)

make it true

The pure adventurousness of making metaphors and poems is a condition that must be felt to be believed. I remember how tremendously excited I was when I first formulated to myself the proposition that the poet is not to be limited by the literal truth: that he is not trying to tell the truth: he is trying to make it.

—James Dickey, “Metaphor as Pure Adventure,” Sorties (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 179

like bread

Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

—Roque Dalton,“Like You”

truth aslant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

—Emily Dickinson, first line of #1129

said with ease

As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.

—Wallace Stevens, from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

great themes

Well, I am preoccupied with the great themes: death, love, the weather.

—John Ashbery, interview by Peter Rose, Melbourne Writers Festival in 1992, 24 Hours (journal of the Australian Broadcasting Corp./ABC)

rejection slips/slights

A rejection slip: “This is too good for our readers.”

--William Stafford, “Aphorisms,” In Pieces: an anthology of fragmentary writing, edited by Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press 2008.

--

We take at face-value the information provided in your cover letter as proof you are a writer, but we could find no evidence of the fact in the work you submitted.

We’re sorry to be slow returning your work, but it slipped through the cracks when we were putting together our ‘intertextual’ issue.

If we were prone to being mean, we’d say your submission was a waste of a stamp.

Nothing better than this has come across our desks in recent months, so it may be some time before we publish another issue.

We’re sorry we cannot use your poems in our next issue. We have not returned the poems themselves, as they have been posted in the lunch room for the amusement of all in our office.

When our theme is ‘sloppy, sentimental poetry’, we hope you will submit again.

This work, I assure you, was not rejected out of hand. There was much belly-laughter and knee-slapping before we could compose ourselves and properly respond to your submission.

Perhaps you were unaware that the ms. copy you sent to us already had a margin note on the last page; and we quote: “Timmy, this is shit. Love, Mom.” We question the wisdom of submitting poems to our journal that your own mother rejected.

One of our intern readers, who granted is prone to scatological humor, said he could visualize the title of your poem on our ‘table of incontinence’.

We encourage you to continue writing…because what’s the harm in it? But submitting work; that we don’t advise.

We are an online publication so our printing costs are nil, but the thought of this text appearing on anyone’s screen made our pixels crawl.

Your electronic submission somehow went directly into my spam folder. Not to say my email software was wrong per se, but to give you some reason for this slow rejection notice.

Shortly after reading your work we ceased publication.

devouring reader

One first needs a good desire to eat, drink and read. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read. Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: Give us this day our daily hunger

—Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie

catapultic language

[W]e will not go back to our tired-out metaphors, we will not slip into the shoes of habit. We want to hear a catapultic language, one that will make the ceiling cave in and the earth tremble. Poetry is by nature stormy, and every image should produce a cataclysm.

—Louis Aragon, "Treatise on Style"

no box

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

—Marianne Moore, National Book Award acceptance speech (1952)

deep down things

And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899), "God's Grandeur," 1918

body and soul

What the soul does for the body so does the poet for her people.

—Gabriela Mistral, inscription on her tomb. From Marjorie Agosin’s introduction to Gabriela Mistral: A Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti.

to get bread

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread…

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1876, (Houghton Mifflin, 1910)

confused epoch

...it is not necessary, because an epoch is confused, that its poets should share its confusions.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years"

bric-a-brac

"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic," said Stevens. "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive," retorted Frost. "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects." "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

—Lawrence Roger Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), p. 61, recounting an exchange between Stevens & Frost in Key West in 1940.

machine of words

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.

—William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New Directions, 1954) p. 256

how does a poem mean

For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:

        body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
        How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.

—John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)