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