two Irish things

If poetry creates a paradise of its own, and tends to make mankind happier, Ireland has indeed need of song…The days of her mourning are not ended. The dirge of a thousand years still swells over the land of numberless sorrows. The voice of her song is still plaintive over the razed homesteads of her valleys, over the sweltering plague-ship and shattered bark of the Western Main.

—Edward Hayes, The Ballads of Ireland, 1856

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The Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains them throughout temporary periods of joy.

—Oscar Wilde

off to work we go

David Ignatow was a salesman and finally president of his father’s book bindery. (Ever a realist, Ignatow wrote in his Notebooks, “Being a poet is to know you do not exist by poetry.”)

Quoted in Robert Philip’s “Poets’ Work, Poets’ Jobs,” The Associated Writing Programs’ Chronicle (December, 1997)

best things ever said

Of the other poets, Baratýnsky wrote very little prose, but this little contains a quite disproportionate amount of the best things ever said in Russian on the subject of poetry. Two of his utterances should be especially remembered: his definition of lyrical poetry as "the fullest awareness of a given moment," and his remark that good poetry is rare because two qualities, as a rule mutually exclusive, are necessary to the making of a poet—"the fire of creative imagination and the coldness of controlling reason."

—D.S. Mirsky, "The Poets' Prose," A History of Russian Literature: From the Beginnings to 1900  (Vantage Books, 1958), edited by Francis J. Whitfield

summoned by

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived

in search of me. I didn’t know, I didn’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

—Pablo Neruda, “Poetry,”

Translated by W.S. Merwin

explicit, concrete, partisan

Politically conscious poets tend to be more profound, not less. Look again at the record. In our own time the three most formidable poets, it seems to me, were intensely "political": the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Vallejo and Brecht (as poet). Political in the most explicit, concrete, partisan way. What's more, their aesthetic achievement is because of their politics, not in spite of it. The most credible, full, caring love poetry has been written by one of the most expressly political poets. I refer, again, to Hikmet. In part this is because he can, and does, write of the other—who is never merely an excuse for self-immersion, and who is not reduced, either, to the condition of a delicious ahistorical object.

—James Scully, "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break: poetry as social practice (Bay Press, 1988)

social antidote

For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it.

—Jorie Graham, “The Cruelest (and Coolest) Month” (Newsweek, April 9, 2004)