10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by James Fenton
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.
The Fifth in a Series of Beau Présents Written for My Favorite Poets
A Beau Présent For John Hodgen
Oh no! John Donne gone?
No doggone gogo dojo?
No dodo hen egg eggnog?
No hood donned, no edge honed.
No good deed done. Heed no one –
No neon god, no hoodoo hedgehog,
No odd noodge (he no good).
Oh, go jog! Nod & ooh.
Go do good, go end godhood,
dodge ego (none needed).
Invented Poetry Forms – The Biolet
Having received such an enthusiastic response to my last post on the triolet,
I figure it would be fitting to follow it up with one on its obscure and even shorter Portuguese cousin, the biolet. The biolet was invented by the Brazilian poet Filinto de Almeida and first appeared in print in his book Lyrica in 1887. It is a six line poem, and like the triolet, the first two lines are repeated as the last two lines, however in reverse. The rhyme scheme of the biolet thus can be expressed as ABbaBA (with the capital letters representing the repeated lines). The length of the lines, in my opinion, can vary, and be either metered or unmetered. Most of Almeida’s original biolets in Portuguese (I have only found a handful written in English on the internet) were in iambic tetrameter (8 syllables), but I, myself, have also been playing with iambic pentameter (10 syllables), iambic hexameter (12 syllables), and unmetered lines of random lengths as well.
I feel the key to writing a biolet is coming up with the first two lines, and then reading them in reverse. If they still make sense in the reverse order, creating the two remaining two lines of the poem should be a snap. If they don’t, try altering them until they do, or start fresh with two brand new lines. Writing biolets can be very fun, and quite easy to do. The subject matter can be almost anything, and the tone can be either humorous or serious. I hope my following examples might inspire you to write some biolets of your own:
From the Files of the Love Detective
Solving the case of your broken heart?
It’s going to be harder than I thought.
It seems your heart really loved a lot.
and no clear clue why it broke apart.
It’s going to be harder than I thought
solving the case of your broken heart.
Final Warning
On an old gravestone, carved in slate,
I read this menacing epitaph
warning of our Creator’s endless wrath
and all humanity ‘s eventual fate.
I read this menacing epitaph
on an old gravestone, carved in slate.
A Biolet for Those Who Cannot Sing
In his unrequited ardor for Fay Wray,
I always empathized with old King Kong.
Since he could not express his love in song,
he had to show his passion in another way.
I always empathized with old King Kong
In his unrequited ardor for Fay Wray.
Biolet for the End of Day
Each night, when darkness descends like a curtain,
I light a single candle and start to pray.
Yes, tomorrow will be another day,
but of only that I can be certain.
I light a single candle and start to pray
each night, when darkness descends like a curtain.
A Frozen Memory
On a chilly afternoon in late November,
I stood at a kitchen window and watched it snow,
And although that was over fifty years ago,
For some unknown reason I can still remember
I stood at a kitchen window and watched it snow
On a chilly afternoon in late November.
Traditional Poetry Forms – The Triolet
As I get older, I frequently find that my failing memory is determined to make a liar out of me. This is definitely the case in a recent post entitled “Grand Little Things…” where I stated that of all the poems I have had published in my lifetime (besides those on this blog), just seven of them were my form poems (three steetbeatinas, a haiku chain, a ziggurat, and in the last two weeks, a pantoum and a quartina). Well, that statement isn’t actually true. I don’t know how it slipped my mind, but the very first form poem I ever got published (which was almost two decades ago) was indeed none of those forms, but a traditional triolet. And since it’s been a while since I wrote a post on poetry forms, I figure that it would be a good one to discus today, even though many of you are probably already familiar with it.
The triolet, thought to have been invented by minstrels in 13th century France, is a brief poem of eight lines, with the first line being repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and rhyming with third and fifth, while the second line serves as a refrain in the eighth and final line and rhymes with the sixth. In other words, the rhyme scheme of the triolet can be expressed as ABaAabAB (with the capital letters depicting the repeated lines). The length of the lines themselves can vary, but are usually metered, most commonly written in iambic tetrameter (four feet or eight syllables) but almost as often in iambic pentameter (five feet or ten syllables).
My very first published triolet appeared in the very first issue of Concrete Wolf: a Journal of Poetry in the Spring of 2001, being the inscription on the title page (an honor more likely due to its wolf theme than the actual quality of the poem). Since I was (and still am) quite terrible at meter, you can see my awkward attempt at iambic tetrameter (with the exception of the third line which contains nine syllables instead of eight):
Yellow Wolf Triolet*
Amidst brick and spackle, steel and stone,
a yellow wolf howled through the night.
In this urban land, he lived alone
amidst brick and spackle, steel and stone.
In his lament, darkness shone
brighter than incandescent light
amidst brick and spackle, steel and stone.
A yellow wolf howled through the night.
*(Originally published in Concrete Wolf, Spring 2001)
And although the above poem was my first published triolet, it definitely wasn’t my first attempt at writing one. My favorite and probably the best of these early tries is the following written in iambic pentameter (which for some reason I am more comfortable with). You may also begin to notice a pattern that most triolets follow, though not all – the word “triolet” is usually contained within the title:
The Thinking Man’s Triolet
Oh, sometimes I think I think much too much,
though others might claim I don’t think enough.
Pondering imponderables and such,
oh, sometimes I think I think much too much.
Perhaps my pensiveness is just a crutch
to do nothing else but sit on my duff?
Oh, sometimes I think I think much too much,
though others might claim I don’t think enough.
Because of the repetition and the fact it turns only on a pair of rhymes,
the triolet is relatively simple to compose. If you can come up with the first two
lines, the rest of the poem practically writes itself. So the most difficult part is deciding what the first and second lines will be. A trick I have often used is to think up a single sentence that can be easily split into two self-contained phrases or lines. Since the subject matter of a triolet can be almost anything (usually it is humorous but Thomas Hardy proved you could also write them about serious matters as well), inspiration can be found everywhere. For instance, I was recently reminiscing about episodes of the classic Star Trek TV series I saw as a kid, and soon the next poem was born:
Doomsday Triolet
First time I heard of a doomsday device
was on an old episode of Star Trek.
I didn’t think the concept was so nice
first time I heard of a doomsday device –
it’s like setting fire to a block of ice
or slipping a noose around the world’s neck.
First time I heard of a doomsday device
was on an old episode of Star Trek.
I myself find movies and television as a great source for ideas for poetry.
The title of my favorite film of 2020, “The Vast of Night”, spurred the succeeding triolet (if you haven’t seen this fantastic movie yet, you can still catch it on Amazon Prime Video):
Nocturnal Wanderings
Let’s wander through the vast of night,
never knowing where we shall go.
Guided toward a distant light,
let’s wander through the vast of night,
and if we’re lucky, we just might
end up in a place we don’t know.
Let’s wander through the vast of night,
never knowing where we shall go.
This final triolet happened when the phrase “higher you climb, better the view” inexplicably popped in my mind, and I was able to work backwards to create the preceding line:
Ascension
There are some folks who may say that
higher you climb, better the view,
yet it’s always poor where they’re at.
There are some folks who may say that
you can’t climb if the landscape’s flat,
and don’t believe it’s really true
there are some folks who may say that
higher you climb, better the view.
Well, I hope you enjoyed my humble triolets, and will listen to my pleas to please trying writing one for yourself. I am sure you will be pleasantly pleased if you do, and will soon find it developing into the most wonderful habit…
10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Dorianne Laux
“I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that’s something someone else has to call you. It’s like bragging.”
“I don’t know if we ever have enough distance to “see” our own trajectory. We’re in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.”
“The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It’s like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family.”
“I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.”
“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one that bleeds. You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn’t depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you’re any good.”
“Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.”
“I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.”
“The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don’t sink.”
“I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but there are times where I’m just not on my game, and I’ll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever – do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I’ll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom.”
“I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.”
–Dorianne Laux
Grand Little Things…
I am not sure about you, my fellow poets, but when sending out my poems to literary journals for possible publication, I have always seemed to have a far easier time getting my free verse poetry accepted than my form poems for some reason. Until recently, among numerous publications, only five of them have been my form poems ( three steetbeatinas, a haiku chain, and a ziggurat, a poetry form I invented which I have yet to discuss on this blog). So I am so pleased to announce that last week I have had another two more published in a brand new online publication called Grand Little Things. Instead of me trying to tell you what this great new publication is like, this is how the editor and publisher Patrick Key describes it in his own words on the About page of the publication’s website:
“Grand Little Things is a journal that embraces versification, lyricism, and formal poetry that focuses on anything, be it the expanse between the minutia of everyday life, to revelations on how we got here or why we use a thing called language. Grand concepts like spirituality, reality, existence are welcomed. So are little things like emotions and human relationships. Or maybe you write about nature? GLT wants to read all formal poems, be they grand like the sestina or little, like the couplet. GLT caters to formalistic, stylized poetry, but it is welcome to invented/nonce forms as well. Heck, as long as there is a strong sense of versification – does the poem sing? Is the imagery vivid and serves a purpose? Does the poem have meaning? Or does it do away with such concepts? – it will be considered…’
If you are so inclined, please read my two poems published on GLT here and let me know what you think. The first “My Personal Poultry Apocalypse” is a pantoum, a Malaysian verse form popularized by French poets in the 19th Century and the second “Hated by Horses” is a quartina, a variation on the sestina, but using a set of only four end words instead of six. What makes this publication even sweeter is that these two poems are from my new chapbook “The Farmer’s Son” for which I am currently looking for a publisher. It seems that my first choice mandates that at least half of the poems of any manuscript submitted must be previously published, and with GLT’s publication of these two poems, that quota has been met and I can now send my manuscript on to them. Yay! And while you are there, be sure to check out all the great formal poets and poems they have published so far, and seriously consider submitting yourself! Like me, I am sure you will be happy that you did…
The Ideal Inspiration Blogger Award
I am so pleasantly shocked to discover that Tanya @ Wildflower Walks and Garden has nominated me for The Inspiration Blogger Award! I want to sincerely thank Tanya for this incredible honor! I really enjoy reading her blog because Tanya has such wonderful posts and some of the most loveliest photographs of flora I have ever seen.
AWARD RULES:
1. Thank the person who nominated you and provide a link back to his/her blog.
2. Answer their questions.
3. Nominate up to 9 other bloggers and ask them 5 new questions.
4. Notify the nominees through their blog by visiting and commenting on their blog.
5. List the rules and display the “Ideal Inspiration Blogger Award” logo.
6. Provide the link of the award creator of Ideal Inspirational Blogger Award as Rising Star from Ideal inspiration. https://idealinspiration.blog/
TANYA’S QUESTIONS FOR ME
1. What do you like to blog about most?
Obscure and unusual invented poetic forms.
2. What’s your favorite kind of bird?
So difficult to answer because I have so many. As a child, I was obsessed with yellow belly sapsuckers, turkey vultures, and cocks-of-the-rock, but right now I am very nostalgic for the common barn swallow.
3. How many books have you read this summer?
All the way through? I guess four, all volumes of poetry.
4. Have you been to another country? If so, where?
Never, but I do long to visit Australia.
5. What’s your favorite flower?
Probably portulaca also known as the moss rose.
MY NOMINEES are these blogs that I enjoy reading and are constant inspiration to me:
5. Roth Poetry
7. J.E. Goldie
8. Kelly Kazek
Here are my questions for my nominees:
1. What is your favorite decade for music?
2. What is the one thing in your daily routine that you would never give up?
3. What is your favorite quote?
4. What is your favorite comfort food?
5. What is the subject of your favorite daydream?
CONGRATULATIONS to the nominees! Thank you for your wonderful and inspiring blogs!
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Dorianne Laux
“Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.”
“Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won’t magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them consciously and unconsciouslyyour style will develop.”
“If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with? And keep reminding yourself to return to that original impulse.”
“A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.”
“To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art – borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done.”
“We aren’t suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.”
“Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It’s about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.”
“I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I’m writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.”
“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.”
“There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I’ve found to be true: writing begets writing.”
—Dorianne Laux
The Farmer’s Son
Loyal readers (if indeed I do actually have any) may recall me mentioning in a previous post back in May a couple of good friends of mine, the very talented poet Curt Curtin and his wife Dee O’ Connor. In the last few months, they generously helped me put together my first real book of poetry, a still yet unpublished chapbook entitled The Farmer’s Son (I have been writing poetry for over fifty years, and believe it or not, this is my first attempt to gather together a volume of my poems for actual publication). Today I would like to share with you the title poem of this collection.
I am not sure if I can claim this poem written about my father Winslow Szlosek, who passed away 26 years ago last month, is the best one I ever written, but definitely my most award-winning and most published as well as a personal favorite, It won first place in The Landmark’s annual poetry contest in 1998, and as I understand one of the reasons why I was awarded the Jacob Knight Poetry Prize in 2001. The poem was subsequently published in Sahara (2001), The Randolph Herald (2018) and numerous times online. Here it is:
The Farmer’s Son
On a certain June evening,
unable to descend
into the shadowy depths of sleep,
I find myself back
in the back of a pickup truck,
seven years old and pining away
for the Saturday morning cartoons
I’ll be missing.
My mom’s at the wheel,
steering the old Ford
down the rock infested path
to the potato field.
My two sisters are already there,
so eager to begin, they are digging
with their bare hands, the soil accumulating
in back quarter moons at the tips of their nails.
And my dad, he’s perched high in the seat of the John Deere
staring straight ahead, as steel fingers
rake the earth behind him.
It’s our job to walk these trenches,
trying to tell the dirt-encrusted spuds from stones,
dropping our bounty in to burlap feed bags
slung over our shoulders.
I do not care to be here,
laboring under the morning sun.
I do not care for potatoes
except for their names:
Kennebec, Catawba, Green Mountain,
names too exotic, too divine
for such bland-tasting fleshy tubers.
I believe they are really the names
of foreign kingdoms,
lands of of untold wonders.
I am the farmer’s son,
but not a good one.
I am, by nature, an indoor child
grown pasty by the blue light
of the television screen,
a pale boy who prefers
school work to farm work,
who withers and faints
while picking string beans
in the summer heat.
My dad conceals his disappointment
in a son who does not share
his love for the land
he has toiled for his entire life.
Yet somehow he understands
and tries not to push me so hard.
Perhaps he recognizes
I am not a crop to be cultivated,
but more like a weed
which must spread its roots
wherever it pleases to survive.
And now once again,
it’s thirty years in the future,
the path I chose, led
not to the potato field,
but this cramped city apartment
where I lie in an unmade bed,
trying to come to grips
with the passing of my father,
harvesting longings and regrets.
It is soul, not soil
I dig through now
and what I uncover may not be
as comforting as potatoes.
—Paul Szlosek (originally published in The Landmark)
Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed my poem “The Farmer’s Son”. As a bonus (or perhaps a punishment?) for those readers who may be curious what I look and sound like now, please click here for a video of me reading it out loud.
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Frederick Seidel
Paul's Poetry Playground 