A Quote by William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made out of words.
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There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
A poem is a small machine made of words.
A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.
A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.
They think so small, they use small words. But not me, I'm smarter than that, I've worked it out. I'm stretching my mouth to let those big words come on out.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.
The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.
Few people wear out before their time. Mostly they rust out, worry out, run out - spill out. A machine must have care and its different parts must be adjusted properly. No machine has ever approached the human machine. When it is right, it is in health.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get to the end of the poem and I still haven't figured anything out, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
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