Bentleyisms

These quotations straight from the lips of Nelson were collected by Mark Anderson, Terry Toy, and Richard Newcomb, members of Bentley’s poetry workshop during the years 1978 - 1981. If you can't see them, try this page.

They are also available in Divertimento: The Lost Works of Nelson Bentley.

Northwest Poetry	Humorous gloom is one of the specialties of the Northwest.
·         One of the great unwritten laws of Northwest poetry is: Don’t take yourself too pompously.	·         There are an extraordinary number of beer images that come out in the poems in this class.
·         There’s a great Ecclesiastes Syndrome in Northwest poetry.	·         Northwest poetry is generally seething with slugs.
·         Most of the poems we get are full of moss, fog, slugs, mud.	·         Humorous gloom is one of the specialties of the Northwest.
·         What this world needs is fewer important poems.	·         If there’s not a little moss and a few mushrooms growing out of the poem, you haven’t gotten into the spirit of the Northwest.
·         All around the country, a kind of languor seems to have taken over the poets. I imagine them sitting around in a state of exhaustion, desultorily sipping on a Scotch, only writing the poem in order to postpone killing themselves. They live in a kind of sticky atmosphere. It hasn’t really crawled across the Mississippi yet, but it’s trying.

The Bible	The Old Testament is just seething with puns.
·         If you took all the storms out of the Bible, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.	·         As a Biblical scholar, I eat lentil soup as often as possible.
·         All elegiac poets are descendants of Ecclesiastes.	·         The Old Testament is just seething with puns.
·         I’m always glad to see the tinge of an apocalypse get into a poem.	·         I’ve never seen a beetle cough, but God knows there are mysteries. I spent 20 years trying to get the crocodile at the Woodland Park zoo to sneeze. I was trying to prove a point about the Book of Job. In had this long stick with a feather on the end...

Animals	Read to sympathetic audiences: dogs, seagulls, trees.
·         Don’t read to cats - they couldn’t care less.	·         It’s not easy to fit a giraffe into a villanelle.
·         I’m always glad to see a marmot get into a poem.	·         Ever since my marriage I’ve been forced to live in a gigantic mass of cats.
·         Read to sympathetic audiences: dogs, seagulls, trees.	·         It’s not easy to get into the mind of a cat.
·         I myself read a lot of poetry to Airedales.	·         Monkey saliva is particularly slippery.

Magazines & Critics	Critics have a terrible fear of laughing.
·         Critics have a terrible fear of laughing.	·         For the love of God, shun all critical jargon as much as possible.
·         I’m haunted by the fact that a few years ago three students got rejections slips from the Northwest Review saying, “This poem is too clear.”	·         Taking a chance is a very important thing. In literary magazines you’ll find hundreds of poems that are overly cautious. What you need is reckless abandon balanced by a fine sense of phrasing.
·         The perfect little-magazine-writing poet is a computer or...James Dickey.

Cliches	There is no such thing as a cliché image, only cliché word combinations.
·         So many people have “ached” about so many things.	·         There is no such thing as a cliché image, only cliché word combinations.
·         Death has done too much lurking already.	·         There’s been entirely too much snuggling and whispering going on in the world.
·         There’s no such thing as a cliché image - any more than there’s a cliché maple tree. You don’t walk by a maple tree and say “Oh God, there’s another maple tree!”

Romanticism vs. Classicism	I believe in a serene classicism.
·         Romanticists have a great tendency to fidget.	·         You have to be an all-out romantic to listen to much Chopin. You should be dying of tuberculosis.
·         All romantics are full of water images.... Any romantic has an almost irresistible tendency to leap into any boat he sees and sail off across the water.... I try to train the students to do without water.	·         There was only one night in my life that I ever really liked [the romantic] Rachmaninoff. And then I had to smoke a really bad cigar simultaneously.The romantic mystique is thoroughly enjoying your suffering.
·         Whenever Auden wrote a love poem, he never got past the second stanza without turning it into something political. That’s how you tell a classicist.	·         A classicist assumes that, whatever is happening to you, you should get an idea of how it relates to world history.
·         I believe in a serene classicism.	·         I’m a romantic living by strict classical principles.
·         The romantic mystique is thoroughly enjoying your suffering.

Language and punctuation	Punctuation is an emotional thing.
·         I even think e. e. cummings should have punctuated. May God forgive me.	·         I hate alphabetical lists. I was scared by a phone book in my childhood.
·         There’s a huge, underground anti-apostrophe movement in the United States... caused by the neon sign industry.	·         One advantage about not using punctuation is that you hide your dangling modifiers.
·         There’s something horrible about an asterisk.	·         Punctuation is an emotional thing.
·         Only Time magazine and Orphan Annie use inversions like “know not.”	·         Support onomatopoeia.
·         The dangling modifier is something that many Americans are addicted to.	·         “Sylvan” is a rather archaic word about woods. It’s only used by realtors now.
·         Dangling modifiers are even better than mixed metaphors.	·         Avoid octosyllabic utterances as much as possible.
·         It’s nice to see an abstraction given such vitality. They’re usually like the walking dead.	·         You’re supposed to slow down when you see a comma, like seeing a croquet wicket in the dark.
·         I have this sneaking suspicion that not everything is always happening in the present tense.... I’m a past tense man myself. Think half the time in the past tense.	·         Henry James had a lasting effect on all the writers who came after him. They figured he had given the comma such a workout that it should be rested for a hundred years.

Forms	Nothing like a good rhyme to clear your head.
·         You can’t mess around in a ghazal.	·         There’s nothing like your first pantoum.
·         Sestinas are dangerous things.	·         I’ve always been fond of curse poems.
·         Critics would have a terrible time writing ballads. They feel a poem should be a seething mass of polysyllabic allusion.	·         Being against rhyme or villanelles is about like coming out against symmetrical trees.
·         I try to avoid anything with type that goes out to the right-hand margin...	·         I have a mad passion for stanza breaks, myself. I always feel like ripping a poem in half and putting in some space.
·         At any one time there are hundreds of bad sonnet writers writing terrible sonnets all over America.	·         The beauty of all forms is that they take the unchangeable and express it through the changing.
·         There’s nothing like a mass of internal rhyme to besmirch a poem.	·         Nothing like a good rhyme to clear your head.
·         If it’s a matter of meter we’ll call it goose liver.	·         Limericks always clear the bead.
·         There’s a nationwide conspiracy to make everything as vague as possible, so you sort of grope around in the haze to figure out what the hell’s going on. People don't realize that universals exist in minute particulars. Universals do not exist in great gaseous clouds!	·         I’ve read more bad limericks than anybody in the U.S. And bad sonnets. Wherever you have a State Poetry Society you have a bad sonnet contest: it follows as the night does the day. There are millions of bad sonnets produced every year. And I read every one of them.
·         I’m the only living teacher of the pantoum form.	·         I’m a bit of a formalist.
·         Limericks, clerihews, and double dactyls can save your life.	·         Every time I deliver a long speech against fragmented sentences, I compel 14 more people to start using them.
·         Most adults have had a dark conviction for 30 or 40 years that rhyme has to be full. If you’re writing for children, don’t be afraid to use half rhymes. Children are the ideal audience for them.	·         What you have in your head belongs on paper.

Pathetic fallacies	It’s like Walt Disney everywhere.
·         Normally I hate talking water.	·         Singing islands have always made me feel uncomfortable.
·         The bad kinds of pathetic fallacies are the ones where the sun is giggling and chuckling and waving hello and eating ham sandwiches. All amateur poets have a ghastly tendency to anthropomorphize everything. It’s like Walt Disney everywhere.	·         If a red light starts dancing around and singing Hallelujah, then you’ve got a pathetic fallacy.
·         Normally, the idea of a talking doorknob would fill me with horror.

Poems and poets	Poets are the articulators of the most important things in the human race.
·         Quick acts of thievery are essential in this business.	·         I think maybe the second coming of Hiawatha is at hand.
·         Poets are the articulators of the most important things in the human race.	·         Without poetic vision there is no love.
·         There are still too many people around who feel that the way to read a poem is in a passionate whisper with the last three lines inaudible.	·         There is a feeling all over the United States that poems are for people under ten years old.
·         Poets and comedians have a lot in common.	·         At any given moment there are millions of pseudo-mad poets around. What we need is the real thing!
·         You’re building on poetry as it exists from the beginning to 1979.	·         Write the way you speak in 1980.
·         Everyone should write an outhouse poem.	·         Poems ought to be as specific as short stories.
·         Any poem that has a good bit of water in it should be sent to The New Yorker.	·         As a poet, you should develop a more enthusiastic reception for the word “slime.”
·         Journalists and sports writers are broken-down poets.	·         It kind of baffles the readers of Hallmark cards that poems say so much between the lines.
·         Poets invent the language. There would be no language if it weren't for us. People would just go around grunting.	·         “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” is probably the single masterpiece of the Victorian era.
·         Think of the poem as an art form, not a message vehicle.	·         A poet ought to know what he’s talking about. It either is, or it isn’t and he shouldn’t say “it seems as if.” Leave that up to the newscasters.
·         Most good poetry is written by people whose fathers told them to shut up.	·         One of the secrets of writing poetry is to make sure that what you have in your head is on paper.
·         Write about individuals, not mobs or types. Find the unique details that define your perception.	·         If anyone can find a 19th Century poet who ran sentences over stanza breaks, I’ll eat my shirt.
·         One extra word can ruin a whole poem.	·         Visualize your metaphors!
·         Some day nothing will be left but poems.	·         Your subconscious is writing poems all the time. All you have to do is fish them out.
·         Put originality into language, not typography. Use punctuation and grammar more precisely than in prose.	·         A line is a musical unit; don't end on the most insignificant word you can think of.
·         Balance the serious and the comic, or combine them.	·         Search your memory for recurrent images, symbolic moments, turning points. These are unwritten poems.
·         Most people writing free verse make stanza breaks whenever a wild impulse comes over them.	·         Evoke, don’t explain. No beating the readers over the head with messages. Think in images, not plot summaries.
·         Which is more interesting: whether the shrubbery seems to be reaching out for you, or whether it is reaching out for you?	·         I always have this mad desire to know who’s doing what, when, where, why. I’d like to know that it’s Alfred P. Zilch taking a stroll at Shilshole Bay, not just somebody taking a walk somewhere.
·         I have a theory that every town has its poet. Sometimes I have to wait for decades. But the poet of Dosewallips has not yet appeared.	·         Poetry nails down who you are.
·         The people who need to be hit over the head with a heavy propaganda message never read poetry. They have no wish to hear anything original.

Art	Art is what holds the world together.
·         Children have a feeling for repetition. They know when something’s worth seeing, it’s worth seeing innumerable times. That’s the principle of art.	·         Art is a vision of reality, and it’s important to know exactly what’s going on, as well as where and when.
·         Art is what holds the world together.	·         Art is reality intensified; it’s not reality all mashed up.
·         Almost every American thinks that art is produced instantaneously.	·         Art involves the structure of society, history, the world: don’t get trapped in moods, or detach your experience from all that’s happened in the last 5000 years.

Famous people	Before Roethke there was nothing.
·         Wordsworth never called a thing by its real name.	·         Before Roethke there was nothing.
·         Ever since I got out of Auden’s class I’ve been trying to figure out how to get people out of the condition they’re in.	·         That’s the nice thing about poetry readings: they’re not fashionable, so only the fanatics go. Unless it’s T.S. Eliot risen from the dead - then everybody goes.
·         When Edgar Allan Poe wrote an elegy, everybody was supposed to go out and kill themselves.	·         I was almost crushed on the New York subway by Arthur Miller’s cousin Oscar.
·         I may have flunked out of math because of Auden.	·         Roethke’s last words to me: “Beefeater all right?”
·         William Wordsworth and I have several things in common. We both had sisters named Dorothy, we both spent a great deal of time up in ash trees that grew quite close to our bedroom windows, and we both had Airedales to whom we read a great deal of poetry.	·         Emily Dickinson got so drunk on dew that she was reeling around and the angels were hanging over the edge of heaven and waving their snowy hats. It’s one of her lesser known poems.

Miscellany	For the love of God, Lois, pass the Budweiser before it’s too late.
·         It’s supposed to be the way that always seems wrong.	·         Avoid self-pity like the plague.
·         It’s the selection on which love counts.	·         Whenever you can toss out oblivion, it’s a good idea.
·         Even I have a little bit of Wogglebug. The rest is Irish.	·         A few tears aren’t going to hurt Shilshole Bay.
·         Never go to a somber and serious doctor. It’s fatal.	·         One has got to beware of unattached moods.
·         Just imagine - your whole life is a network of little accidents.	·         I think I sprained something when I jumped from Andersen’s Fairy Tales to the Gospel of Matthew this afternoon.
·         Don’t kill yourself over a bad editor. Don't jump off the Space Needle.	·         In order to get into this workshop you have to have a large nose or a very strange last name.
·         I have had a lifelong fascination with nose images.	·         I could look at Mt. Rainier constantly for 5,000 years.
·         Never forget the “p” in “raspberry.”	·         For the love of God, Lois, pass the Budweiser before it’s too late.
·         A faculty party is a massive tangle of 50 egos, each trying to impress the other 49.	·         There’s nothing too weird but it exists somewhere.
·         When people read in a sing-song voice, I have to go to class with a bottle of seasick pills.