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)

memory theatre

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

—Nathan Schneider's "The New Memory Theater." The Smart Set (Nov. 19, 2010).

love, war and wit

Auden had three of the qualities that make poets immortal. He wrote beautifully about love, movingly about war, and he was witty.

—Christopher Hitchens, “The essential Auden,” Los Angeles Times (March 04, 2007)

snip off a length

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

—John Ashbery, London Times (23 Aug 1984)

make stone love stone

It seemed to me that Robinson Jeffers was building that house for years and years. Sometimes I'd see rocks piled out there and it looked like he couldn't make up his mind which one to use and they'd be there for a long period of time and then finally they would find a place in these walls that were going up.

—Thomas Gordon Greene, recounting Robinson Jeffers building by hand the 'Tor House', in Carmel CA. (Quoted in "Don't Pave Main Street-Carmel's Heritage," a 113 minute color film, copyright 1994 by Carmel Heritage).

time itself

Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A language that exiles me," boundary 2, (Vol 26, No.1, Spring 1999) translated by Pierre Joris

broken dream

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to the room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter:

........................Then all the charm
Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair,
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes--
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

Yet from the still surviving recollections of his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.—1816.

[Author's note appended to "Kubla Khan Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment (1798)" by S.T. Coleridge]

allusive to some

[Robert Lowell's] poems are not easy reading for the average American, who knows no poetry, no history, no theology, and no Latin roots.

—Helen Vendler, The New Republic, 28 July 2003

no art, only artists

There is no such thing as art...There are only artists who are favoured with a gift of balancing shapes and colours until they get it right. And, rarer still, who possess the integrity of character which never rests content with half solutions, but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.

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

almost, almost

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

—Wallace Stevens, opening lines of “Man Carrying Thing”

objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"

mature poets steal

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922)

metaphoric flaw

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.

—Robert Frost, "Education By Poetry"

momentary stay against confusion

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

—Robert Frost, "The Figure A Poem Makes"

a table or a chair

her [Sylvia Plath's] attitude to her verse was artisanlike: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.

—Ted Hughes, in his introduction to The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 1981)

long enough

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than pleasure.

—Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” The Lives of the English Poets

fifteen thousand

In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”

—Joseph Epstein, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture"
commentarymagazine.com (November 2010)

nothing ever finished

Because nothing is ever finished
the painter would shuffle, bonnarding,
into galleries, museums, even the homes of his patrons,
with hidden palette and brush:
overscribble drapery and table with milk jug or fattened pear,
the clabbered, ripening color of second sight.

Though he knew with time the pentimenti rise—
half-visible, half brine-swept fish, their plunged shapes
pocking the mind—toward the end, only revision mattered:
to look again, more deeply, harder, clearer,
the one redemption granted us to ask.

This, we say, is what we meant to say. This. This.

—Jane Hirshfield, from “History as the Painter Bonnard,” The October Palace (Harper Perennial, 1994)

reading verse

It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.

—W. B. Yeats, introducing his poems in a 1932 recording, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006 (Shout! Factory, 2006)

style is

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible.

—Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994), p51

one word

Un mot et tout est sauvé. Un mot et tout est perdu.

[One word and all is saved. One word and all is lost.]

—André Breton

learn it and die

Solon of Athens (c.640-560 BCE), the great lawmaker and reformer, attended a banquet where he heard a young man sing a poem by Sappho. Upon hearing the song Solon asked the boy to teach it to him. When others at the table asked Solon why he was so keen on knowing that song, he replied: "I want to learn it and die.

[Anecdote told in various classical sources.]

dada drop

The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art. The slippery slope toward dadaism.

—César Vallejo, Aphorisms (Green Integer #52), translated by Stephen Kessler

live and/or die

Famous controversial revision: W.H. Auden changed the last line of his poem "September 1, 1939," from "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die."

elephants teaching

When Vladimir Nabokov was nominated for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?”

Anecdote quoted in D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach.

fine excess

In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

—John Keats, letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)

regal word

Gold rusts, steel decays, marble
crumbles. Everything readies for death.
The firmest thing on Earth is sorrow,
and most lasting is the regal word.

—Anna Akhmatova

without poets, without artists...

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire,"On Painting," 1913, The Cubist Painters (Univ. of California Press, 2004)

criticism of life

When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold’s criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one’s observation; for he was never more essentially a critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry “is at bottom a criticism of life,” still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.

—G.W.E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1904)

ursprache

When the living truth that is implicit in the Ursprache is finally allowed to express itself in accord with its origin, it will do so, Fichte claims, by means of the transformative power of poetry. Fichte agrees with his contemporaries Schiller, Schelling, and Hölderin when he claims that “the thinker (der Denker)…is a poet (Dichter).” A truly original thinker represents in images, as a poet does, the truth of sensual life and in this representation is able to overcome remaining oppositions between subject and object in order to create a newer, more spiritual, comprehensive whole.

—Andrew Gordon Fiala, The Philosopher’s Voice (SUNY Press, 2002)

empire of chimeras

Horace was not one of these who believe that the caprice of the poet suffers no law above itself. In modern times, Young sounded the tocsin of Pseudo-Romanticism, when he declared that “in the fairy-land of fancy genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” The poet, indeed, can create a world of his own, and, if he is endowed with the true genius of the poet, can insure our belief in his creation. But, even the poet must not offend our sense of congruity by endeavouring to unite things that are essentially incompatible. Horace would have no sympathy with the false Romanticism which could bring into being a world of chimeras having no conceivable relation with existing experience. Such things he would regard as the fevered dreams of a diseased imagination. He would thus look askance at the riot of imagination, and the unfettered play of emotion, which many regard as the divine prerogative of poets.
…
In a later passage of the Ars Poetica, he seems to go still further, when he insists that the poet’s fictions be “proxima veris.”

—J. F. D’Alton, Roman Literary Theory & Criticism (Russell & Russell, 1962)

to re-true

Seems to me, the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain—and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn’t get very far without this love.

—John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin, edited by Dorthy Norman (Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949)

consecrated images

Evocativeness is the power of an image to evoke from us a response to the poetic passion. An image need not be novel to do this; there are well-worn words such as moon, rose, hills, West--'consecrated images', Mr. G. H. W. Rylands calls them—which always tend to create this response; and conversely, we may admire an image for its freshness without being moved it.

—C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1984, p.40)

action anyplace

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting.

—J. M. Coetzee, Youth (Random House Group Limited, 2002, 62-63)

human critic

Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares—by a being, not a brain. But they are read just so, judged just so; and some great lack in human qualities is as fatal to the critic as it is to the novelist. Someone asked Eliot about critical method, and he replied: ‘The only method is to be very intelligent.’ And this is of course only a beginning: there have been many very intelligent people, but few good critics—far fewer than there have been good artists, as any history of the arts will tell you. ‘Principles’ or ‘standards’ of excellence are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the critic has nothing to go by except his experience as a human being and a reader, and is the personification of empiricism. A Greek geometer said that there is no royal road to geometry—there is no royal, or systematic, or impersonal, or rational, or safe, or sure road to criticism. Most people understand that a poet is a good poet because he does well some of the time; this is true of critics—if we are critics we can see this right away for everybody except ourselves, and everybody except ourselves can see it right away about us.”

—Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism,” Poetry and the Age (Vintage, 1959)

one more cosmos

Thought, which science has expelled from its place at the top of the spiral of evolution, reappears at the bottom of it: the physical structure of atoms and their particles is a mathematical structure, a relation. What is equally extraordinary is that this structure can be reduced to a system of signs—and is therefore a language. The power of speech is a particular manifestation of natural communication; human language is one more dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. We might add: the cosmos is a language of languages.

—Octavio Paz, "The Verbal Pact and Correspondence" Alternating Current (Arcade Publishing, 1991)

dialect defined

A sprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

—Max Weinreich (Yiddish linguist, in YIVO Bletter, Jan-Feb 1945)

essential gaudiness

I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it.

—Wallace Stevens, letter to William Rose Benét (6 January 1933), Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected & edited by Holly Stevens (Knopf, 1966, p263)

principle of the multitude

The principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the few best is one that is maintained, and, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth. For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. For each individual among the many has a share of virtue and prudence, and when they meet together, they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses; that is a figure of their mind and disposition. Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole.

—Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Part XI (350 B.C.E; translated by Benjamin Jowett)