reading the world

My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor which describes or encapsulates a particular moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.

—Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir (Harper Perennial, 1996)

most accurate instrument

To speak of Poetry is to speak of the most subtle, the most delicate, and most accurate instrument by which to measure Life.

H.T. Tobias A. Wright's introduction to the Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918), translated by Jessie Lamont.

skeleton architecture

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1977)

sentence diagram

Then teacher would draw lines that tied various parts of her sentence together, “at the door” descending like a staircase from its noun. This moment made me happy. I was perhaps the only student in the class who relished diagramming; who could while away a happy hour picturing predicates docking at the ports of their subjects like ships. Levels one through six were called grammar schools then, attesting to the importance once placed upon the subject.

—William Gass, “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence,” Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

right to ask

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.

—Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

lowly potato

If you can get to its essence, even a lowly potato would be poetic.

—Jayanta Mahapatra, “Of the Lowly Potato: Indian English Poetry Today” (2001)

incomplete life

I wanted to signal that My Life was an incomplete work, a Bildungs-poem (or Bildungsgedicht) that cannot fully (or successfully) account for itself. In addition, I wanted to suggest that incompleteness might, and maybe should, be an attribute of any text.

—Lyn Hejinian, “What’s Missing from My Life," The Grand Piano: Part 9 (Mode A/This Press, 2009)

failed harvest

…the conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by “art as a way of life,” has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinary logic, order, and precision, without replacing these with any strong dose of artistic logic, order, and precision. The arts have simply given universal warrant to the offbeat, the intelligible, the defiant without purpose. The schools have soaked up this heady brew. Anything new, obscure, implausible, self-willed is worth trying out, is an educational experiment. Soon, the pupil comes to think that anything unformed, obscure, slovenly he may do is validated by art’s contempt for tradition, correctness, and sense.

[…]

Nothing is right by virtue of its origins, but only by virtue of its results. A stifling tradition is bad and a “great” tradition is good. Innovation that brings improvement is what we all desire; innovation that impoverishes the mind and the chances of life is damnable.

[…]

But nowadays we despise the very word cultivation. I admit that unweeded soil grows wondrous things, which nobody can predict. And these things have an abundance. But it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest.

—Jacques Barzun, “The Centrality of Reading,” The Written Word (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)

tears and laughter

[Great humour] is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as “funny”. Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

—Stephen Leacock, Humour as I See It (Eris pamphlet, no date; first published in 1916 in Maclean’s)