another book in the wall

The last scholar chained to a carrel amid the library stacks.


given to song

The poetry of Japan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interests of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters—is there any living thing not given to song? It is poetry which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors.

—Ki no Tsurayuki (868-945), the preface to Kokinshū
(quoted in The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, Princeton Univ. Press, 1985)


no provenance

I found an old poem in a file, but I couldn't recognize it as mine.


tightly wound

Little wind-up poem amuses for a moment, but quickly runs down, & abruptly stops.


singular statement

Willing to be measured as a poet on the merits of a single poem.


language engineers

Structural, mechanical, chemical, electrical,…poets are the engineers of the language.


complete equipment

The poet is a rebuilder of the imagination…And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony.

For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, in the first place, that he sing; that his voice be pure and well pitched, and that his numbers flow; then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with one another; he must be euphuistic, coloring his thoughts with many reflected lights of memory and suggestion, so that their harmony may be rich and profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be sensuous and free, that is, he must build up his world with the primary elements of experience, not with conventions of common sense or intelligence; he must draw the whole soul into his harmonies, even if in doing so he disintegrates the partial systemizations of experience made by abstract science in the categories of prose.

—George Santayana, “The Elements and Functions of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill, 1968), edited by Lee A Jacobus


fewer yet whole

A poem that won’t be made smaller no matter if half its lines are deleted.


down to words

Because it’s made of such common material (our words), poetry survives (and even thrives) in the most dire and desperate of circumstances.


skin trade

You could not forgive that he said, “Beautiful cover,” about your book.


obscure constructs

Another guidebook chockfull of obscure constructs for one’s amusement.


nothing to it

A good critic must have the audacity to think he/she could have been the creator.


global airspace of poetry

Today I believe that with these eight indigent lines I had gained access to a hoary secret society. Without seeking official permission and empty-handed, I had entered an invisible institution, the global airspace of poetry—it was that simple. Besides, who could those permission-granting officials possibly have been? There was no more Parnassus, nor, far and wide, a brotherhood or bohème. I heard of a poetry scene for the first time when I enrolled at Humboldt University in Berlin. That Prenzlauer Berg with its run-down buildings would later become my very own Montparnasse, my drab Salon des Indépendants, populated by similarly idealistic stragglers as I, was unplanned. The muses, I soon realized, while taking course at the local adult education center, were nothing but a worn-out Greek allegory. The line had long been disconnected; you might as well try reading your poems to the ladies at the municipal registry, or the tellers at the post office. No, no, there was no formal accreditation process. You had to begin from scratch, cut off from both the classical and the modern traditions, in the vacuum of a society that tolerated literature only as mouthpiece for ideology. Even if you couldn’t see yourself that way: You were the young barbarian who undertook to carry the burden of a discarded culture on his frail shoulders in defiance of all evolutionary logic.

—Durs Grünbein, The Vocation of Poetry (Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2010)


difficult fit

A poem yet to find its requisite reader.


basic need

To begin to think of your art as your shelter.


lapsed lines

Your prose poems shouldn’t be your poems that simply lapsed their lines.


rough rider of words

Poet, be cavalier with language.


ways and means

Though in conversation or a drinking bout, Edmund Smith was always jotting thoughts and images. But he completed little.


[Christopher] Smart, being in a madhouse and denied writing materials, wrote much of his verse, probably including the Song of David, with a key on the walls of his cell.


[William] Mickle, being a printer, often composed his verses directly into type without taking the trouble previously to put them into writing.

—Chard Powers Smith, Annals of the Poets (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935)


jutting signage

A marquee title if ever there was one.


from a small flame

That one word was the pilot light which ignited the poem.


something in reserve

Always keep one unwritten poem in the back of your mind.