ambiguous style

In a recording of Robert Lowell reading of his poem “Skunk Hour,” Lowell makes the comment that “…my old friend John Berryman, the late John Berryman, said that the skunks were a catatonic vision of frozen terror. But Dick Wilbur said they were cheerful emanations of nature. That’s the advantage of writing in an ambiguous style.”

same drawing, same poem

I have made this drawing several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

I have made this poem several times—never remembering that I had made it before—and not knowing where the idea came from.

form and thought

A discipline in form is a discipline in thought.

—Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper, 2011)

life and art

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

—Henry David Thoreau