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postcard: Bread Loaf


Epigrammatic notes from a craft class by Thomas Sayers Ellis: "A Risk in Every Room."

~Writing is sweetened by risk ... not merely a secretary to reality ...

~The poet's job is to invent ____truth_____.

~Reality does not give a shit what happened to you.

~The poem [as opposed to poetry] is a flat fixed finished thing, a container. How do you trick poetry into becoming the poem?

~The line is a unit of sound, unit of meaning: this is fragmentation. Now what is fragmentation? The part to the whole--the human brain does not need the whole to get to the thing.

~Stevens, Necessary Angel: poets must learn to find sameness; difference.

~Verse reverses: what begins the scheme of the poem. Smart is one note flat.

~If this is poetry Family Feud, what are the top four ways/words into a poem?

__I__
_The__
__A__
_You__

~You're waking in the front door, but the experience should be different. You should see that the stanzas are bodies standing in the room. You're giving the reader an experience that is not so hand held, so linear. Leap (Bly): what can happen between stanzas.

~Make poems, the music, from the insides, edges, all the possibilities of all the known associations of the text.

~Ben Shaun, The Shape of Content

~There's no way around the prose monster.

~The majority of the work--the good work--you've done a s a poet starts way before you've begun the poem. You select a title, you've made a major mistake. You've selected. You've cut out all the possibilities.

~Go to a different church every Sunday, first draft.

~The poem wants to be whole, organic--it does not make distinctions.

~The poet's job is all things everything.

~At some point sound went that way and meaning went the other. But you cannot show me two syllables that do not make a dance.

~Does the poem "work"? That is not even the question anymore. What's it supposed to do? It is lying there on the paper. That's what it does. Yeah it "works."

~A line of poetry is a breathing walk.

~The lyrical thing a poem reaches for is not a poem.

~You do want to be good at the art of surrendering, good at listening to what the poem wants."

~ ... an advocate of the noble attempt to move through and around things that are already finished.

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