memory theatre

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

—Nathan Schneider's "The New Memory Theater." The Smart Set (Nov. 19, 2010).

love, war and wit

Auden had three of the qualities that make poets immortal. He wrote beautifully about love, movingly about war, and he was witty.

—Christopher Hitchens, “The essential Auden,” Los Angeles Times (March 04, 2007)

snip off a length

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

—John Ashbery, London Times (23 Aug 1984)

make stone love stone

It seemed to me that Robinson Jeffers was building that house for years and years. Sometimes I'd see rocks piled out there and it looked like he couldn't make up his mind which one to use and they'd be there for a long period of time and then finally they would find a place in these walls that were going up.

—Thomas Gordon Greene, recounting Robinson Jeffers building by hand the 'Tor House', in Carmel CA. (Quoted in "Don't Pave Main Street-Carmel's Heritage," a 113 minute color film, copyright 1994 by Carmel Heritage).

time itself

Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A language that exiles me," boundary 2, (Vol 26, No.1, Spring 1999) translated by Pierre Joris

broken dream

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to the room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter:

........................Then all the charm
Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair,
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes--
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

Yet from the still surviving recollections of his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. [I shall sing a sweeter song today]: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.—1816.

[Author's note appended to "Kubla Khan Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment (1798)" by S.T. Coleridge]

allusive to some

[Robert Lowell's] poems are not easy reading for the average American, who knows no poetry, no history, no theology, and no Latin roots.

—Helen Vendler, The New Republic, 28 July 2003

no art, only artists

There is no such thing as art...There are only artists who are favoured with a gift of balancing shapes and colours until they get it right. And, rarer still, who possess the integrity of character which never rests content with half solutions, but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950)

almost, almost

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

—Wallace Stevens, opening lines of “Man Carrying Thing”

objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

—T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"

mature poets steal

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922)

metaphoric flaw

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.

—Robert Frost, "Education By Poetry"

momentary stay against confusion

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad—the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

—Robert Frost, "The Figure A Poem Makes"

a table or a chair

her [Sylvia Plath's] attitude to her verse was artisanlike: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.

—Ted Hughes, in his introduction to The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 1981)

long enough

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than pleasure.

—Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” The Lives of the English Poets

fifteen thousand

In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”

—Joseph Epstein, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture"
commentarymagazine.com (November 2010)

nothing ever finished

Because nothing is ever finished
the painter would shuffle, bonnarding,
into galleries, museums, even the homes of his patrons,
with hidden palette and brush:
overscribble drapery and table with milk jug or fattened pear,
the clabbered, ripening color of second sight.

Though he knew with time the pentimenti rise—
half-visible, half brine-swept fish, their plunged shapes
pocking the mind—toward the end, only revision mattered:
to look again, more deeply, harder, clearer,
the one redemption granted us to ask.

This, we say, is what we meant to say. This. This.

—Jane Hirshfield, from “History as the Painter Bonnard,” The October Palace (Harper Perennial, 1994)

reading verse

It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.

—W. B. Yeats, introducing his poems in a 1932 recording, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006 (Shout! Factory, 2006)

style is

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible.

—Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994), p51

one word

Un mot et tout est sauvé. Un mot et tout est perdu.

[One word and all is saved. One word and all is lost.]

—André Breton

learn it and die

Solon of Athens (c.640-560 BCE), the great lawmaker and reformer, attended a banquet where he heard a young man sing a poem by Sappho. Upon hearing the song Solon asked the boy to teach it to him. When others at the table asked Solon why he was so keen on knowing that song, he replied: "I want to learn it and die.

[Anecdote told in various classical sources.]

dada drop

The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art. The slippery slope toward dadaism.

—César Vallejo, Aphorisms (Green Integer #52), translated by Stephen Kessler

live and/or die

Famous controversial revision: W.H. Auden changed the last line of his poem "September 1, 1939," from "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die."

elephants teaching

When Vladimir Nabokov was nominated for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?”

Anecdote quoted in D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach.

fine excess

In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance — Its touches of Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight — but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

—John Keats, letter to John Taylor (February 27, 1818)

regal word

Gold rusts, steel decays, marble
crumbles. Everything readies for death.
The firmest thing on Earth is sorrow,
and most lasting is the regal word.

—Anna Akhmatova

without poets, without artists...

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

—Guillaume Apollinaire,"On Painting," 1913, The Cubist Painters (Univ. of California Press, 2004)

criticism of life

When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold’s criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one’s observation; for he was never more essentially a critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry “is at bottom a criticism of life,” still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.

—G.W.E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1904)

ursprache

When the living truth that is implicit in the Ursprache is finally allowed to express itself in accord with its origin, it will do so, Fichte claims, by means of the transformative power of poetry. Fichte agrees with his contemporaries Schiller, Schelling, and Hölderin when he claims that “the thinker (der Denker)…is a poet (Dichter).” A truly original thinker represents in images, as a poet does, the truth of sensual life and in this representation is able to overcome remaining oppositions between subject and object in order to create a newer, more spiritual, comprehensive whole.

—Andrew Gordon Fiala, The Philosopher’s Voice (SUNY Press, 2002)

empire of chimeras

Horace was not one of these who believe that the caprice of the poet suffers no law above itself. In modern times, Young sounded the tocsin of Pseudo-Romanticism, when he declared that “in the fairy-land of fancy genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” The poet, indeed, can create a world of his own, and, if he is endowed with the true genius of the poet, can insure our belief in his creation. But, even the poet must not offend our sense of congruity by endeavouring to unite things that are essentially incompatible. Horace would have no sympathy with the false Romanticism which could bring into being a world of chimeras having no conceivable relation with existing experience. Such things he would regard as the fevered dreams of a diseased imagination. He would thus look askance at the riot of imagination, and the unfettered play of emotion, which many regard as the divine prerogative of poets.
…
In a later passage of the Ars Poetica, he seems to go still further, when he insists that the poet’s fictions be “proxima veris.”

—J. F. D’Alton, Roman Literary Theory & Criticism (Russell & Russell, 1962)

to re-true

Seems to me, the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain—and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn’t get very far without this love.

—John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin, edited by Dorthy Norman (Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949)

consecrated images

Evocativeness is the power of an image to evoke from us a response to the poetic passion. An image need not be novel to do this; there are well-worn words such as moon, rose, hills, West--'consecrated images', Mr. G. H. W. Rylands calls them—which always tend to create this response; and conversely, we may admire an image for its freshness without being moved it.

—C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1984, p.40)

action anyplace

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting.

—J. M. Coetzee, Youth (Random House Group Limited, 2002, 62-63)

human critic

Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares—by a being, not a brain. But they are read just so, judged just so; and some great lack in human qualities is as fatal to the critic as it is to the novelist. Someone asked Eliot about critical method, and he replied: ‘The only method is to be very intelligent.’ And this is of course only a beginning: there have been many very intelligent people, but few good critics—far fewer than there have been good artists, as any history of the arts will tell you. ‘Principles’ or ‘standards’ of excellence are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the critic has nothing to go by except his experience as a human being and a reader, and is the personification of empiricism. A Greek geometer said that there is no royal road to geometry—there is no royal, or systematic, or impersonal, or rational, or safe, or sure road to criticism. Most people understand that a poet is a good poet because he does well some of the time; this is true of critics—if we are critics we can see this right away for everybody except ourselves, and everybody except ourselves can see it right away about us.”

—Randall Jarrell, “The Age of Criticism,” Poetry and the Age (Vintage, 1959)

one more cosmos

Thought, which science has expelled from its place at the top of the spiral of evolution, reappears at the bottom of it: the physical structure of atoms and their particles is a mathematical structure, a relation. What is equally extraordinary is that this structure can be reduced to a system of signs—and is therefore a language. The power of speech is a particular manifestation of natural communication; human language is one more dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. We might add: the cosmos is a language of languages.

—Octavio Paz, "The Verbal Pact and Correspondence" Alternating Current (Arcade Publishing, 1991)

dialect defined

A sprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

—Max Weinreich (Yiddish linguist, in YIVO Bletter, Jan-Feb 1945)

essential gaudiness

I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it.

—Wallace Stevens, letter to William Rose Benét (6 January 1933), Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected & edited by Holly Stevens (Knopf, 1966, p263)

principle of the multitude

The principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the few best is one that is maintained, and, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth. For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. For each individual among the many has a share of virtue and prudence, and when they meet together, they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses; that is a figure of their mind and disposition. Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole.

—Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Part XI (350 B.C.E; translated by Benjamin Jowett)

struck note

Uttering a word is like striking a note on a keyboard of the imagination.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 1973)

negation

To put it simply, by the time of Weldon Kees’s arrival, the dominant note in poetry on both sides of the Atlantic was that of negation of the modern reality. The source of this note was, of course, European Romanticism; its current mouthpiece, Modernism. To be sure, the reality by and large did not deserve any better. On the whole, art’s treatment of contemporary reality is almost invariably punitive—so much so that art itself, especially the incurably semantic art of poetry, can be suspected of having a strong Calvinist streak.

—Joseph Brodsky, “Weldon Kees,” (APR, July/Aug. 2010; reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1993)

immense minority

I believe in the "great poet," who isn't the one who reaches the widest public but the one who creates the most public. Even greater would be the poet who could build the total, immense minority. That is my own illusion.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work, ed. & trans. by Christopher Maurer (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1997), pp. 25-33

fossil poetry

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (Essays: Second Series, 1844)

can't take out anything

Disce quod ignoras: Marsi doctique Pedonis
saepe duplex unum pagina tractat opus.
Non sunt longa quibus nihil est quod demere possis,
sed tu, Cosconi, disticha longa facis.

Learn what you don't know: one work of (Domitius) Marsus or
    learned Pedo
often stretches out over a doublesided page.
A work isn't long if you can't take anything out of it,
but you, Cosconius, write even a couplet too long.

—Martial

eschews metaphor

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, and personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Basho said: "Learn of the pine from a pine." Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Basho meant.

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957)

greater reality

A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.

—Theodore Roethke, Straw For The Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday & Co., 1972), edited by David Wagoner

nothing ugly

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, without inner or outer truth.

—Auguste Rodin

not permitted to turn away

First, artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not permitted to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. (Paris, 1907)

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne, translated by Joel Agee

fulcrum of its own body

Shakespeare’s intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont or Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or a passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.

—S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk (1834)

everything contemporary

If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination.

—Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Uncollected Writing of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas

emotionless sentence

a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

—Gertrude Stein, How to Write

body forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969)

defamiliarization or ostranenie

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

—Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis, (U. of Nebraska Press, 1965, p12)

ancient and new shards

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. (#24)

—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms, translation by Behler & Struc (Penn. State U. Press, 1968)

to be and not to be

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was named thus. (#114)

—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms, translation by Behler & Struc (Penn. State U. Press, 1968)

words to thank

Poets, priests and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions

—The Police, "De Do Do Do"

footnotes to the world

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

—George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Realms of Being (Columbia U. Press, 1940)

fugitive presence

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

—Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005)

line by line

Finally, no particular line is valuable except inasmuch as it performs a dramatic function in relationship to other lines in a particular poem: one kind of line ending becomes powerful because of its relationship to other kinds of line endings.

—James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf 2008)

duende

Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unknown accents.

—Federico Garcia Lorca, "Play and Theory of the Duende," lecture in Buenos Aires, 1933

immediate contact

Intuition can only operate by an immediate contact with the thing. In poetry what in logic are called subjective and objective are united. There is no observer and thing observed, both are one; the poet is the bird, the flower, the tree, the Pope (Browning in “The Ring and the Book”), the ship (Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner”), and anything else to which he is able to join himself. And if this union does not take place there can be no poetry.

—Michael Oakeshott, “Philosophy, Poetry and Reality,” What is History? (Imprint Academic, 2004)

step barefoot into reality

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of
    life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
     among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
     reality,

They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens

form ever follows function

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

—Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896)

no penalty for poems

In Our Time

In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.

—Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

multum in parvo

The phrase multum in parvo has always had a special significance for me. In its terse and compact Latin diction, it exemplifies exactly what it connotes: much in little. The archetype of brevity, however, is not easy to define. Abstraction, conciseness, symbolism, and imaginative potential are basic in the concept. A multiplicity of detail is concentrated into a unified principle, the particular is transformed into the universal, a largeness of meaning is conveyed with the utmost economy of means. This largeness of meaning should be accomplished by a dramatic impact, in a word: insight with a gasp.

—Carl Zigrosser, Multum In Parvo (George Braziller, 1965)

hidden place

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

vague and indeterminate

The Italian poet Leopardi believed that vagueness was an essential characteristic of poetry, allowing the mind to "wander in the realm of the vague and indeterminate, in the realm of those childlike ideas which are born out of the ignorance of the whole.”

See G. Singh’s wonderful book, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry (U. of Kentucky Press, 1964). Singh writes: “It is because the poet is attracted to what is vague and indefinite, more than what is clear, concrete, and precise, that his language, even when it does not contain a full-fledged image or simile or metaphor, does to a certain extent partake of the character of an image or a symbol, both saying and suggesting something much more than what it commonly would outside of poetry.”

consolation of poetry

Poets and intellectuals–who are paid little, and who are usually ignored by the general population–have this consolation, at least: they are the ones the tyrants go after first.

—Frederick Smock, “Poetry & Compassion," Poetry and Compassion—Essays on Art and Craft (Wind Publications, 2006)

way through emotion

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling...A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, ch. 1

proper names

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

—W.H. Auden, A Certain World, 1970

just run

I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

—Frank O'Hara, "Personism"

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

negative capability

...several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…

—John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, Dec. 21, 1817

behind painting

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage.

—Brion Gysin,"Cut-Ups Self-Explained," Let the Mice In (Something Else Press, 1973) edited by Jan Herman

too many tools

Nothing so hampers creativity as having all the right tools.

—James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2000)

ordinary mythos

when my central image is a wind-screen wiper, I feel myself just as mythopoeic as if I were writing about the Grael.

—Louis MacNeice, Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words, edited by Clare Brown & Don Paterson (Picador, 2003)

defense of folly

Every defense of poetry is a defense of folly.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

mentally prepared

It is fine to be mentally prepared at every moment that every object and every being shall bring to you some new revelation.

—Rudolf Steiner

understand vaguely

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

—Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"

ahead of its time

And poetry, which is generally ahead of its time, may go so far ahead as to seem behind in time.

—Eugenio Montale, Poet In Our Time (Marion Boyars, 1979)

wordum wrixlan

Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan—to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric form in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse.

—Seth Lerer, “Caedmon Learns to Sing,” Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007)

political poetry

there is a truth behind the assertion that poetry and politics don't mix, but one so warped it turns on itself. The truth is that much of what is called political poetry...is hackwork. From this comes the generalization that politics destroys poetry. Yet isn't that an arbitrary conclusion? Most any kind of poetry is hackwork, is slipshod, undemanding of itself. The work of idle hands that are maybe not idle enough. When you come upon an inept love poem you aren't likely to conclude that love and poetry don't mix. You may think the poet a bad poet, or even a callow person. And you may pass judgment on the work. But you won't jump to generalizations about the incompatibility of love and poetry.

—James Scully's "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break (Bay Press, 1988)

rejection slip

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

—Samuel Johnson

misprint

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

—Oscar Wilde, “The Children of the Poets”

integrity

...the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet...is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened but with what happens.

—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Harcourt, 1963)

accuracy of observation

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

—Wallace Stevens

et in arcadia ego

and they shall read on the beautiful square monument
the inscription that chills my heart at all hours,
that makes me strangle so much sorrow in my breast.

—Jacopo Sannazano (1458-1530), Italian poet, Arcadia, 1502

Et in Arcadia ego: 'Even in Arcadia I am', this Latin phrase implies that death comes even in a place of great beauty and ease. The painting above, by Nicolas Poussin(1594–1665), is titled "Et in Arcadia ego."

permanently contemporary

Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

destiny of speech

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

language game

Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Zettel”

painters and poets

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

—Wallace Stevens, "Adagia," Opus Posthumous, p187

small and large

The briefest poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the entire creation.

—Josiah Royce (American philosopher, 1855 - 1916)

towering crag

The best line is a towering crag.
It won't be woven into an ordinary song.
The mind can't find a match for it
but casts about, unwilling to give up.

—Lu Ji, quoted in The Act of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters, (Shambala, 1996), translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

collide

Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
out of the doubt that fills my mind
I somehow find that you and I collide

—Howie Day, lyrics to "Collide"

ecstasy

If only I were able to live solely in ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body, redeeming each phrase with my days and weeks, infusing the poem with my breath for each word that has been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living.

—Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Talia Shalev

kintsugi

Kintsugi means "to patch with gold", this Japanese technique is thought to have begun in the late 15th century, after a shogun sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China to be fixed. It was returned held together with ugly metal staples, so Japanese craftsmen developed a way to repair the vessel by mending the cracks ornamentally.
    ♦ ♦ ♦

inner workings

Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.”

One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized.

—E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born (Arcade, 1998), translated by Richard Howard

common object

The common object is the sphinx, whose riddle the contemplative poet must solve.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

narcissism

We can put up with someone’s narcissism providing it makes interesting reading and it doesn’t run on too long.

–Charles Simic, ‘The Power of Ruins’ (review of Louise Glück’s Averno in NYRB)

poet's charge

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....

—Walt Whitman, from the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)

upstart crow

Nor must we forget, that, in his own life-time, Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but only Master William Shakespeare of the shrewd, thriving business firm of Condell, Shakespeare & Co., proprietors of the Globe Theater in London; and by a courtly author, of the name of Chettle, was hooted at, as an "upstart crow" beautfied "with other birds' feathers."

—Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850

body is

The body is the great poem.

—Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"

first time

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time.

—Dylan Thomas

not a parthenon

it is not the Parthenon
but a Vuillard small
as an Adam’s apple
where pain mounts and falls

—Frank O’Hara, Stones, 1957-60, a collaboration of lithographs by Larry Rivers & Frank O’Hara

at length

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

—Alfred Hitchcock

sympathetic magic

My present purpose is to attack estrangement…
    It started, for me, from a sensing of something I found myself obeying for some time before, in Call Me Ishmael, it got itself put down as space, a factor of experience I took as of such depth, width, and intensity that, unwittingly, I insisted upon it as fact…by telling three sorts of stories…which I dubbed FIRST FACTS…
    I knew no more then than what I did, than to put down space and fact and hope, by the act of sympathetic magic that words are apt to seem when one first uses them, that I would invoke for others those sensations of life I was small witness to, part doer of. But the act of writing the book added a third noun, equally abstract: stance. For after it was done, and other work in verse followed, I discovered that the fact of this space located a man differently in respect to any act, so much so and with such vexation that only in verse did I acquire any assurance that the stance was not in some way idiosyncratic and only a sign of the limits of my talent, only wretched evidence of my lack of engagement at the heart of life.

—Charles Olson, Black Mountain College (1953). Olson’s Journals, 10: 95-96.
Collected Prose of Charles Olson (U. of California Press, 1997), edited by Donald Allen and Ben Friedlander.

symbolic

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

—Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 40).

image to archetype

At its best, metaphor transforms the image into archetype--a deepening process—the transformational power of the ingeniously conceived and well-rendered metaphor. [JF]

silent poetry

Painting was called “silent poetry”; and poetry “speaking painting.” The laws of each are convertible into the laws of every other.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Art” (1841)

image

No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.
…
That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and must remain within the image or be annihilated.

—Antonin Artaud, “Manifesto in Clear Language”

silence

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
—Charles Simic

locked within

Michelangelo always tried to conceive the figure as lying hidden in the block of marble on which he was working. The task he set himself as a sculptor was merely to remove the stone which covered them.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1950

wild state

Poetry is something like religion in a wild state.
—Novalis

what is literature...

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

—Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

clarity

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

--

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms… But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1963

kinds of difficulty in poetry

Some Characteristics Of Unclear/Difficult/Obscure Poetry:

Purposefully Evading Understanding
The poem was not meant to be clear or to be understood in any conventional sense. Purposefully the poet has crafted something that can’t be parsed or comprehended.
It may have been out of fear that the reader would think the poet thin of mind, or it may be just that the poet resists the notion that poems should be knowable.

It's All There With Enough Time, Effort, And Will
It may take you several hours, days or weeks, years or a lifetime, but nothing in the poem is not stated or has been misexpressed in a way that it can never be comprehended or experienced fully. You might need a bigger dictionary or full encyclopedia set, or the ability to develop the emotional perspicacity of a Colette, but you can get there from here, eventually.

Merely Readerly Failure
The poem is reasonably clear and understandable if the various references and allusions made in the poem can be recognized and grasped. But they can‘t be: (a) Because you have different knowledge set or (b) you have a fairly low level of erudition. The latter is not elitism; it’s a fact that the more you’ve read and studied, the more you’re likely to understand. Some poets prefer to throw a wide net. Others are perfectly happy that only readers of a certain level of knowledge will gain entry to the poem’s fullest sense.

The Translation Or Transference Problem
The poem was perfectly clear in the poet’s mind, but, as rendered, most readers can’t understand it. A translation/transference problem occurred: words as ‘shabby equipment’, or the author’s inability to shape/make the kinds of sentences and language elements that would make the poem understandable across a wide & diverse group of readers

Mimesis Doesn’t Mean Clear
Mimesis of the chaotic or confused: The world is chaotic, life is disorderly and imperfectly understood by the human mind, therefore the poem can or must mirror that disorder and chaos. The jigsaw puzzle spilled, with no attempt made to organize and piece it together.

Pushing Language To Its Limits
With a vast vocabulary and syntactical inventiveness, the poet uses the language in a way that is often hard to follow, difficult to parse or make sense of. Maybe the poet has pulled out all the stops or is pushing the language envelope, so to speak. Think Hart Crane or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or the way Wallace Stevens feels his way through a poem by thinking based more on sound than sense. Ordinary words can be apt neologisms in the hands of certain poets. Gertrude Stein pressing ordinary rhetoric into the ‘surrhetorical’.

The Attraction Of The Fragmentary And Disjunctive
The aphoristic and imagistic attractiveness of certain sentences and phrases are undeniable. So much so that some poets are content to string these elements together or to splatter them about a page and just let them do what they may in the mind of the reader. Sometimes it’s just enjoyable to cut things up, to collage. To revel in the kaleidoscopic or the ‘kaleidosonic’: the slamdance of words and syllables. To break sentences unexpectedly, to leave the reader hanging on a ledge of words, to practice legerdemain with language.

It’s Ineffable Or Just Too Complicated
The difficulty/obscurity of the subject matter or the psychological state that impelled the poem makes the poem difficult/obscure. The writer intended to be clearer but couldn’t manage it and perhaps no writer will ever be capable of capturing the meaning/essence of ‘it’ in words. The experience is real but ineffable. The emotionally driven lyric flight, or the speaker surrendering to a language rending state that may verge on glossalalia, hysteria, or a speaking in tongues. Or, in fact, the subject matter is too large in scope and too multi-faceted or too deeply layered to ever be captured in language or in the space of a single poem or even a sequence of poems. Think of the poem of America that Whitman almost managed to write.

One Or More Possible Readings
The poem is composed in such a way that perfectly good readers will come away with vastly divergent notions of what the poem is about or trying to get at. No one reading is correct; all readings represent valid interpretations and experiences of the poem. The composition may have been intentionally constructed to expose multiple facets and interpretative aspects. Or it just came out that way. Once the poem enters the public domain, whether the poet intended this is somewhat beside the point; though the poet has a right to be disappointed if his/her preferred interpretation wasn’t carried over to the reader (which is related to translation/transference problem).

Calling Attention To The Materiality of Language
The poem is meant to be an experience of perception, rather than to be understood. The experience being on the level of the materiality of language (sound, alphabetic construct, shape, etc., being foregrounded) and consciously not employing the communicative elements that language offers. Sound poetry, pure poetry, certain forms of language poetry. Of course, many readers may experience it in many ways, which is generally not seen as a deficiency but as an opportunity.

[JF]

horde of destructions

Pablo Picasso said that a painting was "une somme de destructions."

Wallace Stevens in “The Main With The Blue Guitar,” translated this to mean "a horde of destructions":

    Is this picture of Picasso’s, this "horde
    Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,

    Now an image of society?

(source check; possibly an essay at poets.org)

communication

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

—T.S. Eliot, "Dante"

amateur

The word “amateur” (from the Latin root amator meaning ‘lover’) means someone who takes great pleasure in his/her field or pursuit.

simplicity

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.

—William H. Gass, Finding A Form

remarks

The only salvation for the systematic mind is the spontaneous random remark which is not to be further pursued but which also must not declare itself as a Law.

—Elias Canetti, Notes and Notations, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann (Noonday Press, FSG, 1994)

magic latern

The image is the magic lantern which lights up the poets in their darkness. But images aren’t alone. There are passages between them which also must be poetry.

—Jules Supervielle,”Thinking About a Poetics” Mid-Century French Poets, edited by Wallace Fowlie Grove Press, 1955)

forgetfulness

“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus, 275a-b)

musical thought

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

— Thomas Carlyle, “Heroes and Hero Worship”

translation

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The next thing to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. II, Chap. 3

bad blurbs

A pity, but I couldn’t bear to go back into these pages even to save my favorite bookmark.
--
I noticed there was a bookplate inside the front cover, and under ‘ex libris’ someone had hastily scrawled ‘Anonymous’.
--
May I suggest that not all books need to be printed on acid-free paper.
--
I can easily imagine finding this book at a library book sale stamped ‘WITHDRAWN’.
--
It’s not a good sign that even prison libraries are refusing donated copies of the book.
--
In poetry the less said the better.
--
Leaving the bookstore that slight pang of buyer’s remorse I felt after spending $24.99 was nothing compared to the full-blown reader’s despair I suffered once I got home.
--
It’s often said that poetry is impossible to translate. In this case any translation would trigger an international incident.
--
I found my mind flashing on scenes from Fahrenheit 451…it was a real ‘page-burner’.
--
Being blind wouldn’t be so bad. At least in Braille my fingertips would have gotten a nice massage if nothing else from this book.

necessary fallows

Any time I’m not writing (which of course means most of the time) finding my way to a new poem feels entirely impossible. There have been many times in my life when I’ve gone months without writing. This happens frequently enough that I’ve come to think of them as necessary fallows, from which I often emerge with an altered set of poetic energies.

—Jane Hirshfield, MiPoesias interview (2005)

What is a poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd around the poet and say to him, "Sing for us soon again"—which is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music, is delightful.

—Søren Kierkegaard, "Either/Or"

accuracy

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge

What's poetry for?

Poetry is all beauty that cannot be explained and needs no explanation.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist, translated by Christopher Maurer

poetry and philosophy

No man was ever yet a great poet who was not at the same time a great philosopher, for poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

contemporaries

Of course. This very day, there’s Bernard Shaw, Stravinsky, Picasso, Chaplin.

—César Vallejo, “Roundabout Artistic Freedom,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)

new taken for old

The ‘new’ poetry based on new words or new metaphors distinguishes itself by its pedantic novelty and by its baroque complication. The new poetry based on new sensibility is, on the contrary, simple and human and, at first glance, might be taken for old, or not even invite speculation as to whether it is or is not modern.

—César Vallejo, “New Poetry,” Autopsy on Surrealism (Art on the Line #3, Curbstone Press, 1982)

pebble or galaxy

[Yvor] Winters is able to prove—demonstrate irrefutably with step-by-step arguments and copious illustrations from line and stanza—that our favorite poets are idiots, and in the process show us just why we like them so much.


A poem is an existent; it has the same status as a pebble or a galaxy. It has no relationship to nature, but only to other existents within nature. And what I think is that any work of art not informed by a bold and determined regard for this equivalency and its effects is deficient intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, and cannot speak to the discerning contemporary sensibility. Let the fundamentalists rage. Poets are quiet seekers unwilling to be deluded.

—Hayden Carruth,“The Nature of Art”(1993)

Tagore

Thirteen years ago, I had the slightly terrifying honor of talking with the venerated and mellifluous Rabindranath Tagore. We were speaking of the poetry of Baudelaire. Someone recited "La Mort des amants," that sonnet so appointed with beds, couches, flowers, chimneys, mantelpieces, mirrors, and angels. Tagore listened intently, but at the end he exclaimed, "I don't like your furniture poet!"

—Jorge Luis Borges, from a review of Tagore's Collected Poems and Plays

conjectures at random

Let us not conjecture at random about the greatest things.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500BC)
    ♦ ♦ ♦

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts would be soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, preface to Philosophical Investigations
    ♦ ♦ ♦

Matthew Arnold

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

–Matthew Arnold

mew images

We are all responsible to work for a better society, and there are two ways [to do this]: theoretically and practically. Poetry cannot work in practical ways, but it can give new images to the world and new relationships between words and things. This is its responsibility.

—Adonis (Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Said Esber)

http://www.praguepost.com/tempo/1547-prague-writers-festival-poet-paints-arab-world-laments-fall-of-poetry-in-west.html

vocabulary

Experts say that English speakers nowadays have a repertoire of words that amounts to 2,000 – 3,000 at best. Now, compare it with the number of words Shakespeare wielded. It is said the Bard mastered over 20,000 words.
(Quoted from wordnik.com)
    ♦ ♦ ♦

criticism

Criticism which began humbly and anomalously existing for the art, and was in part a mere by-product of philosophy and rhetoric, has now become, for a good many people, almost what the work of art exists for.

—Randall Jarrell, “Poetry & the Age"

mise en scène

Mise en scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene." For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition. Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.
--
Mise en scène is a useful term when thinking about imagery in poetry and how the visualized environment is arrayed and apprehended via the resources of language. [JF]
    ♦ ♦ ♦

notebook

The fragments and discards left in my old notebook: the mind’s midden. [JF]

undertow of words

James Murray (editor of the first edition of the OED) said he faced “the terrible undertow of words.”

veneration

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

—Antonin Artaud

wonder

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

—Saint Thomas Aquinas

Pablo Neruda

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me
—Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
    ♦ ♦ ♦

same age inside

We are always the same age inside.

—Gertrude Stein

age

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me

—Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

aesthetic range

I'm not surprised that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I'm surprised that everybody doesn't.
—Thom Gunn
    ♦ ♦ ♦

archetypes

All art is memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in artists.

—Paul Klee

fragment, fragmentary

The fragment is doubtless a disappointing genre, but the only honest one.

—E.M. Cioran

art is...

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

—Guy Davenport

auditory imagination

What I call ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

—T.S. Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (Faber and Faber, 1933)

William Carlos Williams

A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.
—William Carlos Williams

    ♦ ♦ ♦

nobly disheveled

Any bright young man can be taught to be artful. It is impossible to teach taste, but you can teach most anybody caution. It is always the lesser artists who are artful, they must learn their trade by rote. They must be careful never to make false steps, never to speak out of a carefully synthesized character. The greatest poetry is nobly disheveled. At least it never shows the scars of taking care.
—Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence

revision

Occam's Razor is a logical principle attributed to the mediaeval philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific modeling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one. In any given model, Occam's razor helps us to "shave off" those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed to explain the phenomenon. By doing that, developing the model will become much easier, and there is less chance of introducing inconsistencies, ambiguities and redundancies.
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commonplace

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

—Jean Cocteau

poetry is, a poem is...

Poetry presupposes its purpose. [JF]
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The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions.
—Henry David Thoreau
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Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.
—Pierre-Jean Jouve (quoted in Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space)
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Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn't work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written."
—Charles Simic
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A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.
—William Carlos Williams
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A verbal-textual construct that either calls attention to its content through the craft of its making and/or actually creates content by the craft of its making. [JF]
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