I know that many poets and writers keep notebooks of advice they have gleaned along the way from the truly fine poets, both contemporary and historic. I thought it might be interesting to give some rainy day attention (or insomniac nights attention) to share some of our favorite tips and how-to's, advice we might have stumbled across and then written down as "words to/from the wise".
Before there is a general outcry of reined-in poetic freedom, let me hasten to add that I don't mean "rules" but "guidelines". To paraphrase the old Abe Lincoln aphorism, these might suit some of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but will in all likihood not suit all of the people all of the time.
My thought is that if each person also gives the source, we might glean new ideas for our summer reading.
So I offer two from my own notebooks to start with.
From "After New Formalism" edited by Annie Finch.
In a good poem, as everybody knows, form is inseparable from sense and tone. No poem worthy of its name can be formless, whether it is written according to metrical rules or in free verse. The sounds, rhythms, pitch and intensity of the lines ARE the poem. Every poem IS its form.
Essay, "The Trouble with a Word like Formalism", by Anne Stevenson, p. 219.
and
From: "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End". Barbara Herrnstein Smith, p. 51.
Now it has often been observed that the terminal rhyming couplet of the English sonnet allows the poet to end it with striking resolution, finality, punch, pointedness, and so forth. It is also true, however, that many sonnets are poorly concluded, their endings limp or flat. No matter how perfectly constructed the poem may be with respect to form, if its thematic structure is inadequately concluded, the terminal couplet will not do the job by itself. We may still ask how much of a job it does and how it does it—realizing that to speak of its epigrammatic force, or rounding off or knitting up powers, is only to restate the fact, but not to explain it.
There is good reason to maintain that a rhymed couplet, when it corresponds to a syntactically complete utterance, is, in itself, an effectively closed form. Nevertheless, the sense of closure produced by a sonnet ending does not arise so much from the independent effectiveness of the rhymed couplet as from its effectiveness in relation to the formal structure that precedes it.
I am assuming that most keep a notebook of sorts for this kind of reminders.