a poem is

[apoemis]

The Flexible Lyric by Ellen Bryant Voigt

[apoemis]

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds Shelley

[apoemis]

Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler

[gatheringbones]

the gloria anzaldua reader, edited by analouise keating, 2009

[etneanmoins]

What is the poet's subject? It is his sense of the world. For him, it is inevitable and inexhaustible. If he departs from it he becomes artificial and laborious and while his artifice may be skillful and his labor perceptive no one knows better than he that what he is doing, under such circumstances, is not essential to him. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

[apoemis]

[itsmightyfunny]

[apoemis]

Nuar Alsadir

[loneberry]

Alice Notley

[gliklofhameln]

I would say that the very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. Because if you use all of your emotions indiscriminately, you will kill yourself. Although the man who commits suicide is often a man of intellect, he seldom kills himself because of the conviction that it is better not to be than to be. In most cases, it’s from anger or a desire to punish somebody or to escape from himself. So emotions are the very topic of literature. Actually, all the arts deal with emotions. When you take away the emotions from a mathematician, he may still be able to make his calculations, but when literature becomes too intellectual, which means it begins to ignore the emotions and becomes brainy and cold, it loses everything.

    — Isaac Bashevis Singer, as quoted in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Richard Burgin

[apoemis]

Le vrai poète,—une vérité habillée d’une manière bizarre, un paradoxe apparent, qui ne veut pas être coudoyé par la foule, et qui court à l’extrême orient quand le feu d’artifice se tire au couchant.

Baudelaire

[apoemis]

The Energies of Words

Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

[apoemis]

Recently and belatedly, I was taught that if you want to insure contact will be made when you go to give and receive a high-five, you must look at the other person's elbow. I cannot write a statement that discloses my elbow, nor do I want to turn Celan's handshake ("I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem") into the very different and vertical gesture that is the high-five. A statement is accusatory, and as such is in competition with the poems themselves as the things that work to accuse— to accuse meaning to give things the substance of a charge, wanting maybe to mean to give things the charge of a substance. Duncan: "For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions nor an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics." In My Enemies poems are provisional, are provided by an attending—at its root there is to stretch, strain, aim, hear—that betrays itself and is experienced as a diffuse intentionlessness near oblivion or some other lure.

In an interview Agnes Martin described the difficult process of giving up on ideas and theories, of not having any herself and not believing anybody else's. Thinking and believing are relinquished simultaneously, so that, she says, "I have an empty mind, so when something comes into it you can see it," and then she says "that must be enough," and means that last statement to end the interview, for the disclosure of the nothing she thinks of to be sufficient, and it is; the interview ends there. There is a thing called the zero conditional and this isn't it: "If nothing happens it is possible / To make things happen." Neither is that, this: "when this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something." Neither is agitation incompatible with the taste of or for nothing. Nor is any of that all of what we're after—follow or seek—, tradecraft, all our problems turning off, palm to palm, a statement or book between them.

New American Poets: Jane Gregory

Work from first first books by some of today's most innovative and interesting poets. This series was presented biannually from 2003-2015.

[blushunadorned]

Etel Adnan on poetry:

"What we can truly call poetry starts with innocence. To be true to oneself is the starting point. To be fresh to the world is the starting point. Then life will take care. Nobody knows, until it happens, what will happen, so let go, at least don't ever lie, most of all to yourself. If the death of a fly touches you more than the death of a soldier let that go on a page. It will be your first poem."

This is the end of her "Short letter to a young poet". From the book "The Sun on the Tongue".

[jacobwren]

"My theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not like a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds. I had a terror I could tell to none, as Dickinson would say." - Lucie Brock-Broido

[mykristeva-deactivated20250214]

I believe...poetry must progress by deliberately trying to defeat the expectations of its readers or hearers.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

[antigonick]

Foucault talks about a flash of lightning that harrows the night, a violence that leaps at its own core. You kiss my eye. You cross me. Here is the speechless place. Beget what we are.

—Anne Carson, Wonderwater