Poetry Considered
1 POETRY is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2 Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.
3 Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ’Listen!' and ‘Did you see it? Did you hear it? What was it?’
4 Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
5 Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.
6 Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.
7 Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze-fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
8 Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
9 Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
10 Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
11 Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
12 Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between .
13 Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
14 Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.
15 Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
16 Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumbprints of dust, blood, dreams.
17 Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
18 Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
19 Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
20 Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
21 Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
22 Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
23 Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
24 Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
25 Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
26 Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours, of weaving and waiting during a night.
27 Poetry is a statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
28 Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes.
29 Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’
30 Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
31 Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
32 Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
33 Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
34 Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
35 Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterflywings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
36 Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
37 Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smokestacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
38 Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.