no echoes

Slowly from nice neat letters;
doing things well
is more important than doing them.

--

Wake up singers!
Time for the echoes to end
and the voices to begin.

--

Quarreler, boxer
fight it out with the wind.
It’s not the fundamental I
that the poet is searching for
but the essential you.

—Antonio Machado, There is No Road (White Pine Press, 2003), Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney translators.

bars of gold thrown ringing

[Commenting on a stanza from Shelley’s poem “Laon and Cyntha"]

The rhythm is varied and troubled, and the lines, which are in Spenser like bars of gold thrown ringing one upon another, are broken capriciously. Nor is the meaning the less an aspiration of the indolent muses, for it wanders hither and thither at the beckoning of fancy. It is now busy with a meteor and now with throbbing blood that is fire, and with a mist that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is bound together by the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser’s verse is always rushing on to some preordained thought.

—W. B. Yeats, “Edmund Spenser,” Selected Criticism and Prose (Macmillian, 1980)

incurable and infectious malady

“As you will," said the barber; "but what are we to do with these little books that are left?"

"These must be, not chivalry, but poetry," said the curate; and opening one he saw it was the "Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor, and, supposing all the others to be of the same sort, "these," he said, "do not deserve to be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do the mischief the books of chivalry have done, being books of entertainment that can hurt no one."

"Ah, senor!" said the niece, "your worship had better order these to be burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping; or, what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is an incurable and infectious malady."

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Chapter VI: “Of the diverting and important scrutiny which the curate and the barber made in the library of our ingenious gentleman”

tale not teller

Source of Lawrence's oft-quoted remark: ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale’ or ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’…

The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Thomas Seltzer, Inc., 1923), p. 3.

creative drive

Parker Kaufman speaking about his father, Beat poet Bob Kaufman:

"It's frustrating when everyone's telling you, 'How dare you talk back to your dad? He's a genius,' " Parker says. "Meanwhile, it's O.K. for him to sleep on the sofa all day, drinking beer and smoking four packs of cigarettes."

Children of the Beats by Daniel Pinchbeck
Nov. 5, 1995, The New York Times Magazine

[And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead, documentary about Bob Kaufman]

better than silence

I am working and trying to deserve the privilege of speaking, writing, and knowing perfectly well that the only words which really deserve to exist are words better than silence, but it’s not easy to find these words. Because language is such a word. The language of silence seems to be much more powerful. It’s a great challenge. That’s why I go on working and working, looking for words, chasing words.

—Eduardo Galeano, interview by Robert Birnbaum, published July 18, 2006 on Identity Theory

stands at the boundary

There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to become prose.” No one has ever gone farther in this direction. He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know.

—George Seferis, “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966), trans. by Rex Warner.

light to see by

The poem…is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.

—Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review (March 22, 1958)

entre nous

OBSCURITY, A PRODUCT OF TWO FACTORS. If my mind is richer, more rapid, freer, more disciplined than yours, neither you nor I can do anything about it.

—Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (Vintage, 1961), trans. by Denise Folliot.

hearing it read

Strolling across the University of California, Santa Barbara campus one afternoon, poet and professor Kenneth Rexroth saw one of his students lying on the grass. “What are you doing?,” he asked. “Oh, I’m reading a book of poetry,” the student replied. “How can you be reading poetry?” Rexroth queried. “I don’t hear anything.”

Quoted from Mira Rosenthal’s “The Self Made Strange: On Translating Tomasz Różycki’s ‘Iterations',” Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois U. Press, 2010), edited by Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa.

greater lyric

I begin to understand how a critic like [Ivor] Winters can argue that the brief lyric may be greater than a complete tragedy, since the lyric can hope for perfection, an unflawed wholeness and unity.

—Donald Justice, “On the Purity of Style,” Platonic Scripts (U. of Michigan Press, 1984)