pleasantly astonished

The art to astonish in a pleasant manner, to make a subject strange and yet familiar and attractive, this is romantic poetry.

—Novalis

Quoted in the The Brahms Notebooks* (Pendragon Press, 2003) translated by Agnes Eisenberger

*originally Jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein by Johannes Brahms, edited and introduced by Carl Krebs

simple and practical

In my civilization it's customary to describe poetry as discarded, almost moribund, an all-too-exclusive art form, without power to break through. And the poets try to push themselves upon the world of the mass media, to get a few crumbs of attention. I think it is time to emphasize that poetry—in spite of all the bad poets and bad readers—starts from an advantageous position. A piece of paper, some words: it's simple and practical. It gives independence. Poetry requires no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around, it isn't dependent on temperamental performers, dictatorial directors, bright producers with irresistible ideas. No big money is at stake. A poem doesn't come in one copy that somebody buys and locks up in a storeroom waiting for its market value to go up; it can't be stolen from a museum or become currency in the buying and selling of narcotics, or get burned up by a vandal.

When I started writing, at 16, I had a couple of like-minded school friends. Sometimes, when the lessons seemed more than usually trying, we would pass notes to each other between our desks—poems and aphorisms, which would come back with the more or less enthusiastic comments of the recipient. What an impression those scribblings would make! There is the fundamental situation of poetry. The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another.

—Tomas Tranströmer,"Answer to Uj Iras," Ironwood 13 (1979), pp38-39, translated by Judith Moffett.

unrefuted song

I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say: 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it'. I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.

—W. B. Yeats, in letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham three weeks before his death.

starting with the self

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.

ethical relationship

All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination and the image. Images are not ornaments; they are truths.

—Eavan Boland, “A Kind of Scar,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (W.W. Norton, 1996)

cat feet on crusted snow

In 1936 I heard Wallace Stevens read his poetry at Harvard: it was the first time Stevens had ever read his poetry in public, and this first reading was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event to Stevens.... Before and after reading each poem [he] spoke of the nature of poetry... he said, among other things, that the least sound counts, the least sound and the least syllable. He illustrated this observation by telling of how he had awakened after midnight the week before and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house.

—Delmore Schwartz, "The Present State of Poetry” (1958), Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz (Univ. of Chicago, 1970), eds. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker.

[Quote first encountered on Don Share's Squadermania blog.]

non linear

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)

[No source found, but quoted as epigraph to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.]

raw and cooked

Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course. Randall Jarrell has said that the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet's audience and given him students.

—Robert Lowell, 1960 National Book Award acceptance speech.

or elephants or love

LISH: There’s that figure whales. Whales and elephants and Alcibiades. What precisely do you mean by whales?

GILBERT: You know without my telling you that no poet means precisely anything. It’s not a one-to-one relation. That’s allegory. It means a lot of things. For one, it’s the impossibly literal world. And it’s what you can’t reduce to the human scale. For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.

—Jack Gilbert, interview by Gordon Lish, Genesis West, #1, 1962.

simplest vocabulary

The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like "incarnadine." This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors – from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly, the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric.

—Louise Glück, "Education of the Poet," Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994)

unfashionable things

Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.

—Robinson Jeffers, forward to Selected Poems (p. XV)

dancing logos

But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally 'pedestrian, or walking, logos', as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left hemisphere language (the referential language of prose)."

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale U. Press, 2009)

long line short line

By stress and syllable
by change-rhyme and contour
we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.

The short line
we refine
and keep for candor.

—Robert Duncan, from the poem “Keeping the Rhyme,” The Opening of the Field (New Directions, 1973)

chopped into lines

Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

—Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" (1918)

speech proud in sound

Music—“speech proud in sound”—is central to her work. Barbara Howes has said of Louise Bogan that she was “so finely honed by her writing and sensitivity and lifetime of addiction to reading that she was almost a musical instrument.” The poem “Musician,” in both substance and form, speaks eloquently of what Louise Bogan calls elsewhere “the ordered strings”:

      Where have these hands been,
      By what delayed,
      That so long stayed
      Apart from the thin

      Strings which they now grace
      With their lonely skill?
      Music and their cool will
      At last interlace.

      Now with great ease, and slow,
      The thumb, the finger, the strong
      Delicate hand plucks the long
      String it was born to know.

      And, under the palm, the string
      Sings as it wished to sing.

This poem represents one of the most extraordinary achievements of sound that I know in modern poetry. Note the vowels—the short i sounds throughout; and the rhythm hovering between two and three beats to the line; and then the final sense of the actual plucking of the strings. It is a poem about resonance that resounds in the mind long after it is read. And, of course, the poem is much more than just music about music; it is about the artistic process itself, which Louise Bogan examines in so many of her poems, and about the artist who has waited to return to his craft.

—William Jay Smith, Louise Bogan: A Woman’s Words (Library of Congress, 1971, pamphlet), lecture delivered at Library of Congress, May 4, 1970.

==
n.b.: That phrase “speech proud in sound” comes from another Bogan poem, "Baroque Comment."

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- of 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"