Things to think about when writing or reading poetry

Below are some poetry thoughts from Wayne Dodd, from a course I took from him in 1991 at Ohio University.  I posted this before on PC, but it’s been a while.  Enjoy!

• Language as magic, as a glimpse of something just beyond vision.
• Attention beyond intention.
• Language, where speaking speaks what is speechless (as opposed to unspeakable).
• Avoid the habit of always hearing what we already understand.
• It is the unspoken that comes closest to a true speaking language.
• Avoid reductive digression and fender straightening.
• Think about truth and the search for it.
• The interval created by “if” makes the poem.
• The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself.
• The more it’s your own voice, the more I want to hear it.
• All poems are language problems.
• A poem should move to a further dimension beyond description and telling. There needs to be further seeing and insight.
• Take that next step beyond something managed, safe and careful.
• There is no room in a poem for the merely descriptive.
• To be able to stay with uncertainty longer.
• Hear a more delicate music.
• Free the hand of imagination.
• You’re lost in a poem the minute you know what the conclusion will be.
• Writing requires a certain kind of listening, waiting, and receptiveness.
• Don’t be guilty of balance prepense.
• Cliché thinking holds the author from the possibility of a further encounter.
• A good poem is always about more than one thing.
• Ego and intention get in the way of listening to what is really in a poem.
• Be on the catch for things that happen in a poem.
• Memory is a ready and dependable source of material.
• It is a test of character to take good stuff out of a poem.
• Be responsible to things, both within and without.
• A poem is something overheard, not something to be heard.
• Be vigilant against the merely self-indulgent.
• Honor both that which is within one’s self and that which is outside one’s self.
• The over explicit poem is incomprehensible.
• Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
• The mystery of being must be present in a poem.
• Pay attention to the detail of the landscape.
• Use a vocabulary precise to the landscape.
• Hold back the rush of one’s intentions towards something.
• Be quiet a little longer, be silent a little longer.
• Every good poem is a risk with sentimentality.
• Whatever you are writing about is done for its own sake, it’s done out of love and respect for it.
• The unbearable beingness of being.
• Pay attention to the interior and exterior in balance.
• Where you see a problem in a poem is not necessarily the source of the problem.
• A neurotic essence of emptiness.
• A poem must create a habitable space, that’s the poem.
• A poem should not be too restrictively about something.
• A gambit to see something else, something more.
• Hold back a little longer.
• A good poem honors silence. What is doesn’t say is what makes you like it.
• Being and non-being: mutually exclusive and mutually defining.
• You don’t see something until you have an image of it already.
• A spiritual and prayerful preparation of seeing.
• Looking for beauty till it perches like a bird on your gun.
• I don’t want to write any poems I know how to write.
• One breaks silence only to bring attention to something more important.
• There are forms of meaning that we’ve had no part in creating: one can hear it, as much as anywhere, in the silence.
• Poems are all about becoming, and all long for being.
• Poetry is a singing, not a solicitation; not persuasion, just existence.
• A craving, a longing, a blood relationship with nature. Have you tried being fire?
• The best poems are written and read in fear.
• You change one thing in a poem and everything else changes.
• Generalizations are the allies of tyranny and oppression and falsehood: poetry honors the specific.
• All good poems are personal to everybody, not to an individual.
• A poem is a loving invocation of “thingness.”
• Push toward that place where a poem merges with the large emotional content of human life.
• Absolute unmixed attention is prayer; maybe it’s also poetry, dammit.
• Give it a chance to become metaphoric.
• In a dream there is not an alternate reality, it is a sensually complete world.
• The most trustworthy material is that which we do not intend, but are a host for.
• Danger sign for a bad poem: feeling too good about it once it’s done.
• A poet’s only responsibility is challenging his habitual patterns of thought and feeling.
• Put pressure on language to make it yield up an energy of content to make something available.
• Use a language or music that is least likely to mistake one’s concerns.
• The line is the last bastion against chaos.
• The poem suddenly achieves the translation of the reader from a familiar mode of perception to an unfamiliar mode of perception.
• Pretty is easy, beautiful is much more demanding.