A poet's life begins in conflict with the whole of existence.
—Søren Kierkegaard
corner of your eye
Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all....It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.
—William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl (U. of Michigan Press, 1978)
—William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl (U. of Michigan Press, 1978)
small worlds
Kleinkunst in German refers to a so-called art of small forms, “little art,” in other words.
[…]
By “small forms” in literature, we generally understand various types of prose works of short length. These might include short stories, sketches, anecdotes, essays, reviews, feuilletons, and aphorisms. They were, to be sure, cultivated at a time when large novels, full-length plays, and fine poetry of every hue and stamp were being written...But the modernist upheaval in the arts beginning at the turn of the century [19 to 20th] created a climate of experimentation and innovation of far-reaching consequences for all literary creativity. Structural and linguistic transformations of conventional literary genres, from novel to poem, was also accompanied by a spurning of these genres by writers who were attracted to, and sought to make their niche in, the emerging world of literary small forms.
The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938 (Purdue U. Press, 1993) by Harold B. Segel
[…]
By “small forms” in literature, we generally understand various types of prose works of short length. These might include short stories, sketches, anecdotes, essays, reviews, feuilletons, and aphorisms. They were, to be sure, cultivated at a time when large novels, full-length plays, and fine poetry of every hue and stamp were being written...But the modernist upheaval in the arts beginning at the turn of the century [19 to 20th] created a climate of experimentation and innovation of far-reaching consequences for all literary creativity. Structural and linguistic transformations of conventional literary genres, from novel to poem, was also accompanied by a spurning of these genres by writers who were attracted to, and sought to make their niche in, the emerging world of literary small forms.
The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938 (Purdue U. Press, 1993) by Harold B. Segel
only ear
Have I still ears? Am I only ear, and nothing else besides?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).
scope in a single subject
One of the most daring paradoxical minds, Lucian of Samosata, defined, as early as the second century AD, the concept of creation. In discussing a painting by the Greek master Zeuxis, he justified the singularity of the masterpiece, which is not only a token of skills, but has as much to do with the expression of a vision: “There are no doubt qualities in the painting which evade analysis by a mere amateur, and yet involve supreme craftsmanship—such things as precision of line, perfect mastery of the palette, clever brushwork, management of shadow, perspective, proportion, and relation of part to the whole; but I leave that to the professionals whose business it is to appreciate it; what strikes me especially about Zeuxis is the manifold scope which he has found for his extraordinary skill, in a single subject.”
—Lucian of Samosata, “Zeuxis and Antiochus,” Works of Lucian, Vol. II (Clarendon Press, 1905), translated by H. W. Fowler.
[Quote found in Donatien Grau’s The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]
—Lucian of Samosata, “Zeuxis and Antiochus,” Works of Lucian, Vol. II (Clarendon Press, 1905), translated by H. W. Fowler.
[Quote found in Donatien Grau’s The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]
dead color
When I saw Degas again, he happened to have a box of pastels in his hand, and was spreading them out on a board in front of the window. Seeing me watching him:
—I take all the color out of them that I can, by putting them in the sun.
—But what do you use, then to get colors of such brightness?
—Dead color, Monsieur.
—Ambroise Vollard (1886-1939, an important French art dealer) recounting Paul Cézanne's conversation with Edgar Degas.
[n.b.: quote was encountered yesterday as the epigraph to a limited edition of Charles Wright's poetry called Dead Color (Meadow Press for Charles Seluzicki, Fine Books, Salem OR, 1980)]
—I take all the color out of them that I can, by putting them in the sun.
—But what do you use, then to get colors of such brightness?
—Dead color, Monsieur.
—Ambroise Vollard (1886-1939, an important French art dealer) recounting Paul Cézanne's conversation with Edgar Degas.
[n.b.: quote was encountered yesterday as the epigraph to a limited edition of Charles Wright's poetry called Dead Color (Meadow Press for Charles Seluzicki, Fine Books, Salem OR, 1980)]
joyce's motto
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
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