You cannot write a poem until

You cannot write a poem until you hit upon its rhythm. That rhythm not only belongs to the subject matter, it belongs to your interior world, and the moment they hook up there’s a quantum leap of energy. You can ride on that rhythm, it will carry you somewhere strange. Stanley Kunitz

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It’s all about the line

More syntax. And more and more. “I see dead people using syntax.” from chapter 2 of The Art of Syntax, “The Sentence and the Line” …poetry likewise makes use of two often competing rhythmic systems: the rhythm of syntax I have been discussing, which poetry shares with well-made prose, and the rhythm of the line. [...]

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Syntax as meta-structure: how do we order poems?

from what I’m sure will be an ongoing series of questions. When we are putting together poems for a chapbook, a book, a reading, how do we order them? How do we even think about ordering them? What’s the weight, the flow, the phrasing? I think there’s this idea that one reads a poetry book [...]

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Language nerds only need read: syntax as phrasing

more updates from the world of The Art of Syntax, chapter 1. Grammar controls the function of each word in the sentence and lines it up on one side of a clause or the other: “mask” can a thing (noun) or an action (verb) depending on its usage. Grammar also regulates that usage, and the [...]

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Eight Weeks of Syntax

So the next eight weeks or so of my reading and writing life will be all about syntax. Seriously, truly, deeply about syntax. (quick, why is the latter NOT a fundamental English sentence??). Not just syntax as grammar, though—syntax as order, as counterpoint to the music of meter, as a constant series of choices about [...]

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Natasha Trethewey

from Native Guard, a book that, as a whole, is about looking back at oneself, seeing reflections that are real and reflections that are twisted. Look at what she does in this poem, only a few pages after a poem about Narcissus. ______________ Myth I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you [...]

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Mark Twain’s 19 Rules Governing Literary Art

From Twain’s brutally funny essay on Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses in the Deerslayer series. I thought of this essay on Saturday at the Brandywine River Museum, standing in front of one of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for Deerslayer. Here’s the beginning of the essay; I’ll put the link to the whole piece at the bottom. It [...]

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Elias Canetti on language

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

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Ira Sadoff “Structure and Poetic Memory” Drew 2nd Residency

Notes and Fancies from Ira Sadoff’s Lecture “Structure and Poetic Memory” Ira challenged us to really consider the structure of the poem – not its grammar, or its form, or its meter or lines, but structure as the connection between all the craft elements and its poetic argument, as how the poem carries meaning and [...]

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Ars Poetica, Drew, 2nd Residency

Ira Sadoff on Dickinson—the powers of complex metaphors connected by association, the wilderness of her imagination Anne Marie Macari speaking about Theodore Roethke—when I feel a poem in my mouth, in my body, I am rich in physicality Jean Valentine quoting Berryman’s advice to a young poet—“If you have to be sure, don’t write.” Ira [...]

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