not innocent

Great poems are innocent of neither ideas nor technique. But poetry which becomes ideas or techniques has diluted to the danger point the process of poetry. As a poet advances in sophistication and technique, this danger dogs him.

—Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing (The Library of Congress lecture, undated pamphlet)

soap-bubble line

Think your sentences before you write them; otherwise they are like the continuous bumps of bubbly soap that used to be left in the bowl instead of becoming the iridescent globes desired by the pipes of our childhood. A line of poetry is an iridescent soap-bubble.

(March 1, 1949, Letters to Marcel Béalu)

—Max Jacob, Hesitant Fire (U. of Nebraska Press, 1991), selected prose of Max Jacob, translated and edited by Moishe Black and Maria Green

not poet

Every poet must, I think, feel a bit uneasy when receiving honours, because he knows that like the label poet itself—even more so—they have nothing to do with being a poet and writing poetry. A poet is only a poet when he is writing poetry, and when his is writing poetry least of all does he know that he is a poet. In fact, usually the attempt to write poetry makes him painfully aware that he isn’t.

—Stephen Spender, Chaos and Control in Poetry (The Library of Congress, pamphlet, 1966)

metre-making argument

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

list making

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

poetic ear

Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.

—George Seferis, On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966) translation by Rex Warner

continuing on

Poetry is about continuing poetry.

—Joanne Kyger, ABOUT NOW: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1997, p. 631)

only two creators

Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.

[Only God and the Poet deserve the name Creator.]

—Torquato Tasso

against style

There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style.

—Archibald MacLeish, from the poem "Invocation to the Social Muse"

breathing in

inspiration
c.1300, "immediate influence of God or a god," especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiracion "inhaling, breathing in; inspiration," from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), noun of action from pp. stem of L. inspirare "inspire, inflame, blow into," from in- "in" (see in- (2)) + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit). Literal sense "act of inhaling" attested in English from 1560s.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary.

should be an event

[Eliot writes in a letter to J.H. Woods, his former professor at Harvard.]

My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.

—T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot (vol. I, Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285), edited by Valerie Eliot.

new image, new world

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images live directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, p. 47)

feeling for fragment

Our feeling for fragment as form is an explanation of free verse.

—J.V. Cunningham
(Quote comes from the class notes recorded by D.G. Myers in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar taught by J.V. Cunninghan in 1976.)

ambiguous style

In a recording of Robert Lowell reading of his poem “Skunk Hour,” Lowell makes the comment that “…my old friend John Berryman, the late John Berryman, said that the skunks were a catatonic vision of frozen terror. But Dick Wilbur said they were cheerful emanations of nature. That’s the advantage of writing in an ambiguous style.”

same drawing, same poem

I have made this drawing several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

I have made this poem several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

form and thought

A discipline in form is a discipline in thought.

—Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper, 2011)

life and art

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

—Henry David Thoreau

stone wind gray

It doesn’t bother me that the word “stone” appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that “wind” and “gray” appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable.

—Richard Hugo, title essay of The Triggering Town (Norton, 1979)

elaborate philosophy

I don't mean…that I'm trying to elaborate a philosophy in a poem: I mean that that these thoughts are part of one's feeling about everything—it can't just be kept out, except by the purest artiness.

—George Oppen, Selected Letters, pp. 18-19

labor as symbol

A favorite device among literary people is to regard nature as a storehouse of symbols. The person who does this does not experience the tree or the pelican as a tree or a pelican, but forces it to labor right away as a symbol.

—Robert Bly, “The old postion,” News of the Universe (Sierra Club Books, 1980)

architectural book

...a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades and domes.

—Viginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

two Irish things

If poetry creates a paradise of its own, and tends to make mankind happier, Ireland has indeed need of song…The days of her mourning are not ended. The dirge of a thousand years still swells over the land of numberless sorrows. The voice of her song is still plaintive over the razed homesteads of her valleys, over the sweltering plague-ship and shattered bark of the Western Main.

—Edward Hayes, The Ballads of Ireland, 1856

---

The Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains them throughout temporary periods of joy.

—Oscar Wilde

off to work we go

David Ignatow was a salesman and finally president of his father’s book bindery. (Ever a realist, Ignatow wrote in his Notebooks, “Being a poet is to know you do not exist by poetry.”)

Quoted in Robert Philip’s “Poets’ Work, Poets’ Jobs,” The Associated Writing Programs’ Chronicle (December, 1997)

best things ever said

Of the other poets, Baratýnsky wrote very little prose, but this little contains a quite disproportionate amount of the best things ever said in Russian on the subject of poetry. Two of his utterances should be especially remembered: his definition of lyrical poetry as "the fullest awareness of a given moment," and his remark that good poetry is rare because two qualities, as a rule mutually exclusive, are necessary to the making of a poet—"the fire of creative imagination and the coldness of controlling reason."

—D.S. Mirsky, "The Poets' Prose," A History of Russian Literature: From the Beginnings to 1900  (Vantage Books, 1958), edited by Francis J. Whitfield

summoned by

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived

in search of me. I didn’t know, I didn’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

—Pablo Neruda, “Poetry,”

Translated by W.S. Merwin

explicit, concrete, partisan

Politically conscious poets tend to be more profound, not less. Look again at the record. In our own time the three most formidable poets, it seems to me, were intensely "political": the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Vallejo and Brecht (as poet). Political in the most explicit, concrete, partisan way. What's more, their aesthetic achievement is because of their politics, not in spite of it. The most credible, full, caring love poetry has been written by one of the most expressly political poets. I refer, again, to Hikmet. In part this is because he can, and does, write of the other—who is never merely an excuse for self-immersion, and who is not reduced, either, to the condition of a delicious ahistorical object.

—James Scully, "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break: poetry as social practice (Bay Press, 1988)

social antidote

For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it.

—Jorie Graham, “The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month” (Newsweek, April 9, 2004)

living use

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

—Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

two cheeses

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

—G. K. Chesterton


A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.

—W.H. Auden, "Shorts II"

separate words

Marianne’s [Moore] words remain separate.

—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

modest and secret complexity

The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity.

—Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to "The Self and The Other" (1964).

seeks its music

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of the poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. [45]

—Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (first published in Fortnightly Review, 1877), Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

language really used

   The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

—William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800)

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.)