Author: Paul Szlosek

Paul Szlosek was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge, as well as a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in various local publications including the Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Worcester poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, and (most recently) the hodgenelle.

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Richard Wilbur

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 8 Comments

“Writing is? Waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.”

“If a good poem has an air of spontaneity, it has that air because the poet has been careful, in his slow and choosy writing of the poem, to keep in touch with its original impulse. And one must try to do that, one must try to keep the poem seeming sudden and abrupt even though it has been slowly contrived.”

“Sometimes very strong feelings don’t get written up because the interesting metaphor or dramatic situation doesn’t suggest itself. So much of one’s life goes unused.”

“When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.”

“Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.”

“I write poems line by line, very slowly; I sometimes scribble alternative words in the margins rather densely, but I don’t go forward with anything unless I am fairly satisfied that what I have set down sounds printable, sayable. I proceed as Dylan Thomas once told me he proceeded—it is a matter of going to one’s study, or to the chair in the sun, and starting a new sheet of paper. On it you put what you’ve already got of a poem you are trying to write. Then you sit and stare at it, hoping that the impetus of writing out the lines that you already have will get you a few lines farther before the day is done. I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.”

“Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product’s something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.”

“That’s the main business of the poem!-to see if you can’t make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.”

“I’m grateful to all of the poets of the past who have delighted me, and who gave me a feeling that I wanted to do something like that. And if there is a muse, I’m grateful to the muse for the occasional experience of making something as good as I wanted it to be.”

“It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.”

—Richard Wilbur

The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse (May 3rd, 2023)

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 5 Comments

Dear Readers,

I must apologize for the eternity it has taken, but here is finally the link to the latest edition of The International Imaginarium for Word & Verse featuring the incredibly talented poet Padmaja Battani posted last Wednesday night on our Imaginarium website for you to hopefully peruse and enjoy at your leisure:.

I want to thank my fellow bloggers Angela Wilson (AKA poetisatinta), and (Gypsie) Ami Offenbacher-Ferris for graciously accepting my invitation to participate which I previously posted on this blog. Like previous times, I have decided not to repost the entire Imaginarium here on this blog as I have often done with the editions of the Virtual Poetorium because I feel that it is probably too long a read and thus far too overwhelming for most of my readers (as a result, some really excellent poetry might be skipped, and that would be a real shame). So instead, I will just post this month’s Imaginarium group poem (which is probably one of my favorite segments of both the Poetorium and the Imaginarium). You might recall we have often rewrote the classic Wallace Steven poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as our group poem in the past, but substituting other things for the blackbirds such as umbrellas and dandelions This month, we once again used that classic poem as a template, but this time we used manhole covers as our subject. The way it worked was all our participants sent us one to eight lines containing either the phrase “manhole cover” or “manhole covers”, and then all contributions were numbered and compiled into a poem entitled “Seven Different Ways of Looking at a Manhole Cover”. I want to thank Robert Eugene Perry, Howard J Kogan, Angela (aka Poetisatinta), Tim McCarthy, and the others who wish to remain anonymous for contributing and making the preceding poem possible (Angela’s contribution can be found published as an individual poem on her website Let’s Write…)…

Seven Different Ways to Look at a Manhole Cover

I.
Among the busy city streets
The only things not moving
Were the manhole covers.

II.
My mind was split thricely
Like manholes
On three divided streets

III.
From below the manhole cover
Appears to be the gate of the overworld,
From above, the underworld.
Are heaven and hell separated
By the steel disc of a manhole cover
Or are they connected?

IV.
Among the concrete slabs
The only circle I see
Is that of the manhole cover
It holds back gravity
Concealing a black hole
Squeezed into this space
Beneath a manhole cover.

V.
He rode over a manhole cover
In an old car
He dreamed of manhole covers for weeks.

VI.
I have often mistaken manhole covers
For subway tokens of the Gods
Or Superman’s rusty Frisbee.

VII.
There once was a missing manhole cover.
At which a curious fellow would hover
He fell into the murky mucky dark hole
As he lost all control,
“Mercy me” he cried to discover his lover.

—The International Imaginarium Group Poem for May 3rd, 2023

Attention: The First International Imaginarium For Word & Verse of 2023 Has Been Postponed…

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 17 Comments

Dear Readers,

I have some bad news and good news concerning our first edition of The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse for 2023 (featuring Padmaja Battani) previously scheduled to be posted on the Imaginarium website this evening. The bad news is that I tested positive for COVID this Thursday, and consequentially am not in shape to finish the Imaginarium in time for tonight and will have to postpone it until I am feeling better (currently, I’m suffering from both low energy and brain fog which makes the task nearly impossible). I am not exactly sure when that will be, but I hope to have this edition of the Imaginarium out sometime by mid-April. The good news is that if you wanted to participate but could not make the deadline, you now can. I am now once again accepting contributions until Saturday, April 8th. Thank you so much for understanding and hope you will take advantage of this extended opportunity to contribute to our latest edition of the Imaginarium…

An Invitation to Participate in the First International Imaginarium For Word & Verse of 2023…

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments

Dear Readers,

I’m happy to announce that The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse is finally back from its five-month hiatus this month and would like to invite all of you to participate in our fourth edition (our very first one for this year) with Padmaja Battani, a very talented poet, and writer living in Connecticut, as our featured poet to be posted on our Imaginarium website on the evening of Tuesday, March 28th, 2023.

To be part of our Imaginarium open mic this month, please send us one to three of your own original poems or stories (under 2000 words altogether please) either in a Word document file or pasted in the body of an email along with your name, any opening remarks you care to make, and where your poem has appeared if it was previously published to poetorium@mail.com by Friday, March, March 24th. Also if you like, you can send us a photo of yourself to be posted above your poem, but that is totally optional.

We also need contributions to this month’s Imaginarium Group poem. This month, we are going back to something we previously tried twice before with the Poetorium group poem, and use the classic Wallace Steven poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as our poem’s template, but this time substituting the phrase “manhole cover” for “blackbird”. So to participate, please send us one to eight lines containing either the phrase “manhole cover” or “manhole covers”. Your contributions (which like always will remain anonymous unless otherwise requested) will then be numbered and compiled into this month’s group poem which will be tentatively entitled “Different Ways of Looking at a Manhole Cover” Once again, the deadline to contribute will be Friday, March 24th.

If you have any questions about submitting to the virtual open mic, the group Imaginarium poem, or anything else about the International Imaginarium For Word & Verse itself, please leave them in the comments of this post, and I will try to answer them right away.

Thank you so very much for reading, folks! As always, I really appreciate everyone’s continued support of this blog, and hope to hear from you soon with your contributions to our fourth edition of the International Imaginarium!

10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 14 Comments

“If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”

“Poetry is what we would cry out upon awakening in a dark wood in the middle of the journey of our life.”

“The best writing is what’s right in front of you. Sometimes I’d walk down the street with poets and they wouldn’t see anything. I’d have to shake their arm and say, ‘Look! Look!’”

“A poem can be made of common household ingredients. It fits on a single page, yet it can fill a world and fits in the pocket of a heart.”

“I’m really not interested in ‘craft’—I think it’s a miserable word to be applied to poetry. Do you think Keats and Shelley thought about ‘craft’? In fact, can you imagine Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth or any of the other great poets, let’s say Dante, can you imagine them going to a poetry workshop?”

“For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.”

“I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment.”

“Publishing a book of poetry is still like dropping it off a bridge somewhere and waiting for a splash. Usually, you don’t hear anything.”

“Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.”

“Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds… Poetry should transport the public to higher places than other wheels can carry it…”

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing By Galway Kinnell

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 11 Comments

“A poet should not call himself a ‘poet’, being a poet is so marvelous an accomplishment that it would be boasting to say it of oneself.”

“Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what’s to come.”

“That’s the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.”

“One thing that leads one into poetry is an interest in words. Not words as written things with a referent, but words as sound that the body produces, that fill the mouth and that are therefore in some way psychically identified with the thing they’re talking about. And that have a content which can’t be reduced to a definition. Like ‘spartled.’ ”

“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”

“It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.”

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”

“When you write well, there is a kind of special mood that comes upon you, different, I suppose, for every person, but for everyone different from just the normal, day-to-day way they feel. And words seem to come on their own. You’re understanding them and shaping them, and yet they come out saying things that you didn’t know you could say.”

“There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version”

“Most good poems address themselves to things that we all know about, and the only preparation we need, as readers, is a kind of paying of respect to our inner life, to the feelings we have that are of no practical importance: the sense of strangeness and the hauntedness of existence; the fragility of our position on the globe, and the fragility of the globe itself; this very peculiar situation we’re in, self-conscious creatures who know that we’re lost in some kind of existence that we don’t understand at all.”

—Galway Kinnell

10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Don Paterson

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 16 Comments

“Poetry is unlike other art forms because you can’t really do it for a living. It seems more a helpless disposition. I always think poetry may be one corner of a larger syndrome. It often involves obsessive and addictive personalities – and mental illness. Most poets can’t drive a car and the ones who do drive shouldn’t.”

“Poetry is the science of nuance in language.”

“A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying special care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem’s end.”

“Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.”

“The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself … Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.”

“Poems are deliberately unstable statements, where you’re supposed to see yourself in the thing — if the poem is any good.”

“I think there are real mistakes in thinking you have something called “your voice”, because that just leads rapidly to self-impersonation. Then you just sit down to write another poem that sounds like you, and that’s just self-censorship, and it leads to terrible repetition. The big danger is that people fall in love with their own voices. I’m sure I do too, but I try to avoid it.”

“If you write poetry, it’s your own damn fault.”

“People need to learn to have patience with the language. Most people can write a pretty good line, but a really good line can start with a tiny gesture or small shift in language or shift, that takes time. Big revisions are necessary in the beginning, larger seismic shifts, but I always think that publication is the point of being finished, and if you don’t have that in mind, that idea of public art, the whole relationship is incorrectly configured from the start. As you start to anticipate that condition and somebody else’s eye on it, then that really helps you write your best lines. You have to read it as someone else’s poem.”

—Don Paterson

The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse (November 29th, 2022)

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

Dear Readers,

Here is the link to the very last edition of The International Imaginarium for Word & Verse for the year 2022 featuring the incredible 2021 Stanley Kunitz Medal-winning poet Eve Rifkah posted last Tuesday night on our new Imaginarium website for you to hopefully peruse and enjoy at your leisure.

I want to thank my fellow bloggers John Ormsby,  Angela Wilson (AKA poetisatinta), and (Gypsie) Ami Offenbacher-Ferris for graciously accepting my invitation to participate which I previously posted on this blog. Like last time, I have decided not to repost the entire Imaginarium here on this blog as I have often done with previous editions of the Virtual Poetorium because I feel that it is probably too long a read and thus far too overwhelming for most of my readers (as a result, some really excellent poetry might be skipped, and that would be a real shame). So instead, I will just post this month’s Imaginarium group poem (which is probably one of my favorite segments of both the Poetorium and the Imaginarium). Since this was our last group poem of the year, the theme is fittingly the year 2022. Contributors were asked to send us one to a dozen lines beginning with either “This was the year of…” or “This was the year that…”. All contributions we received were then compiled and included in this month’s Imaginarium Group Poem. I want to thank Howard J Kogan, Karen Durlach, and Angela Wilson (AKA Poetisatinta) for participating and making the following poem possible (Angela’s contribution can be found published as an individual poem on her website Let’s Write…)…

The Year 2022

This was the year the threatened
Red Tide happily died at sea.

This was the year we stopped
mentioning his name,
people even gave up Bridge.

This was the year of discovery and recovery
but for some, a year of death and misery
a year of hypocrisy, invasion, and migration
of numerous variants and vast inflation
while we observed the effects of climate alteration
and now there’s controversy with the World Cup situation.
In the UK we had a glut of Prime Ministers
and the cost of electricity is bleeding us dry
there was joy in June celebrating the jubilee
but tears within months when we had to say goodbye
as a nation we joined together in the mourning
but now we have hope with the rise of a king.

This was the year of 8 billion
8 billion sets of hopes and dreams
8 billion sets of needs and wants and hungers.
Gaia tipped over, spilled tears of blood,
of flood, dry tears of drought,
melting ice, enflamed with fires, war.
8 billion thinking themselves autonomous,
each filled with billions more microbes,
bacterias, viruses, fungi, living in symbiosis,
more resilient than the vessels,
poised to evolve again.

—The International Imaginarium Group Poem for November 29th, 2022

An Invitation to Participate in the Final International Imaginarium For Word & Verse of 2022…

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 7 Comments

Dear Readers,

I’d like to invite you all to participate in what will be our very last International Imaginarium For Word & Verse of 2022 featuring the 2021 Stanley Kunitz Medal-winning poet, Eve Rifkah (I’d love to have a Christmas-themed Imaginarium this December like we did with the Virtual Ho-Ho-Etorium last year and the year before, but unfortunately I don’t think I‘ll have the time during this hectic holiday season) that I will be posting on the Imaginarium website on the evening of Tuesday, November 29th. To be part of our Imaginarium open mic, please send up to three of your own original poems or stories (they can be Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year-themed or no particular theme at all, whatever you like to share) either in a Word document file or pasted in the body of an email along with your name, any opening remarks you care to make, and where your poem has appeared if it was previously published to poetorium@mail.com by Sunday, November 27th. Also if you like, you can send us a photo of yourself to be posted above your poem or story, but that is totally optional.

Like always, we also need contributions to this month’s Imaginarium group poem. Since this will be our last group poem of the year, the theme will fittingly be the year 2022, so please send us one to a dozen lines beginning with either “This was the year of…” or “This was the year that…”. All contributions (which will remain anonymous unless otherwise requested) will be compiled and included in this month’s Imaginarium Group Poem to be tentatively titled “2022″. Once again, the deadline for submissions is the night of Sunday, November 27th, 2022.

If you have any questions about submitting to the virtual open mic, the group Imaginarium poem, or anything else about the International Imaginarium For Word & Verse itself, please leave them in the comments of this post, and I will try to answer them right away.

If you’ve been meaning to participate in the Imaginarium, but have been putting it off, please keep in mind this will be your last chance this year. As always, I appreciate everyone’s continued support of this blog. I hope to hear from you soon with your contributions to the last edition of the International Imaginarium of 2022! Thank you so much for reading, and have a fabulous Thanksgiving, folks!

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing By Diane Seuss

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments

“Writing is really difficult. It taxes every part of you. It’s a lifelong practice, not a month-long or a year-long.”

“My revision process may be a bit unusual, in that I usually revise within a very brief window of opportunity. I have written poems for so long that I write them with (at least) two minds—the present tense improvisor, and the revisor, with a longer view. I don’t move on until I get that particular poem, the poem-of-the-moment, right.”

“The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do without.”

“There are more poets than pigeons these days. I’ve known poets who aged gracefully into silence. I’d like to keep writing as long as I can because it feels good; it’s always been who I am. I don’t know how it will go down, if I’ll write myself into the grave or someday or other find I’m out of words. Maybe I’ll turn into a poem, and writing more will seem redundant.”

“Therapy is therapy. Poetry is poetry. Reading or writing a poem can be a therapeutic experience in the broadest sense of the word, but for me, poems don’t offer relief in the way we might hope therapy does. They can offer wisdom, which I think unfolds through study and time, and wisdom is often complicating, not a panacea. There are ideas in poems that I couldn’t begin to untangle when I first read them. Making use of them is a whole other story. It can take years. Maybe the most important poems gestate within us for a lifetime and only arrive on our death beds.”

“There is a risk in poetry circles of appearing to be retro-confessional, but I do my best not to worry about such things. My hope is that the telling I did will be emboldening to others. That it will have been of some use.”

“Why do you write? Spend some good time with that question. What does success look like to you? Consider how you can take care of yourself financially and emotionally. That’s important too, and it’s grounding. How you can have as safe a place as possible to live. Focus also on what you can give to others that you wish you’d had yourself.”

“I don’t think doubt is necessarily a bad thing, unless it is incapacitating. In fact, a lot of good poems have arisen out of doubt. No honor or award diminishes the fact that when I sit down to write, I am facing what all writers face, an unmarked page. That having written does not assure that you can write.”

“The poetry landscape is so challenging, in that social media blasts it all in your face 24 hours a day. It’s impossible not to compare yourself to others, and yet that is the least helpful activity imaginable. We’re led to believe that instant success is the expectation, that poems going viral is the test of someone’s potential for a writing life. There is so much temptation to let your work be guided by the capitalist notion of the poem as product — saleable and marketable. Of yourself as product, curated to draw a certain kind of attention and influence. All of this noise is external to the poem itself. I recommend taking the long view. Turn down the noise. Practice experiencing the world in its real vs. virtual form. Live. I really believe that if you are in deep conversation with your own particular history, the history of your people, whoever they are, with your strange, doubt-filled, funny/sad particularities and unheroic fuck-ups, and if you read what you need rather than everything in your face, and if you court periods of silence and solitude, and if you practice, and persist, you will be okay.”

“Poetry is language which arises from experience, though sometimes “experience” is mind, thoughts, imagination.”

—Diane Seuss