tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39831632114500243022024-03-19T23:14:31.977-07:00Conjectures At Random<br><br>
<i>Let us not conjecture at random about the greatest things.</i><br> —HeraclitusJforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.comBlogger363125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-68544476105908768042024-02-28T10:10:00.000-08:002024-02-28T10:10:44.803-08:00incomplete lifeI 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.
<br /><br />
—Lyn Hejinian, “What’s Missing from My Life," <a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780979019883/the-grand-piano-part-9.aspx"><i>The Grand Piano: Part 9</i></a> (Mode A/This Press, 2009) JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-30193084138165353882024-01-11T09:15:00.000-08:002024-01-11T09:15:44.156-08:00failed 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 <i>he</i> may do is validated by art’s contempt for tradition, correctness, and sense.<br />
<br >
[…]<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
[…]<br />
<br />
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.
<br /><br />
—Jacques Barzun, “The Centrality of Reading,” <i>The Written Word</i> (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-6423176719984522452024-01-03T09:43:00.000-08:002024-01-03T09:43:26.420-08:00tears 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.
<br /><br />
—Stephen Leacock, <i><a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/humour-as-i-see-it/9781912475780" target="Humour as I See It">Humour as I See It</a></i> (Eris pamphlet, no date; first published in 1916 in <i>Maclean’s</i>)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-76392680626530348832023-11-24T08:51:00.000-08:002023-11-24T08:51:05.168-08:00supposed personWhen I state myself as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.
<br /><br />
—Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-8784995564399590872023-11-07T10:53:00.004-08:002023-11-07T10:57:43.473-08:00for example jujubes[Frank O'Hara] also mentioned a lot of things just because he liked them—for example jujubes. Some of these things had not appeared before in poetry. His poetry contained aspirin tablets, Good Teeth buttons, and water pistols. His poems were full of passion and life; they weren't trivial because small things were called in them by name.
<br /><br />
—Kenneth Koch, "A Note on Frank O'Hara in the Early Fifties," <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.28032978.pdf" target="Audit 1964">Audit</a> (1964)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-79624452709838509682023-10-24T11:42:00.003-07:002023-10-25T09:07:33.551-07:00stopped by a poetIt never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens. When I was very young, reading Shakespeare and Blake and Keats, or when, in adolescence, I began reading Yeats and Eliot and Pound, my experience of reading invariably strengthened an existing sense of vocation. Because this experience, the fact that reading great poets increased my confidence, never varied, I had no reason to examine it. Then something completely different happened; then a door was shut very sharply. Reading Stevens, I felt I would never write, and because I didn’t want this to be true, I had to look more closely at those early experiences, and at the new, to find the source of the verdict.
<br /><br />
—Louise Glück, “Invitation and Exclusion,” <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76547.Proofs_Theories" target="Proofs & Theories">Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry</a></i> (Ecco, 1994)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-90381472644619111182023-05-15T05:56:00.001-07:002023-05-15T05:56:32.797-07:00calm formsStill others owe their beauty to human violence: the push toppling them from their pedestals or the iconoclast’s hammer has made them what they are. The classical work of art is thus infused with pathos: the mutilated gods have the air of martyrs. Sometimes, erosion of the elements and the brutality of man unite to create an unwonted appearance which belongs to no school or time: headless and armless, separated from her recently discovered hand, worn away by all the squalls of the Sporades, the Victory of Samothrace has become not so much a woman as pure sea-wind and sky.
<br /><br />[…]<br /><br />
A world of violence turns about these calm forms.<br />
<br />
—Margeurite Yourcenar, title essay of <i>That Might Sculptor, Time</i> (FSG, 1992), translation by Walter Kaiser.
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-6327562706345072452023-03-01T07:17:00.003-08:002023-03-01T07:24:22.936-08:00sortit à cinq heuresPoet and critic Paul Valéry once remarked that he could never write a novel because he would have to write sentences like, ‘The Marquis left at five’.
<br /><br />
[n.b.: I ran across this anecdote again recently in David Markson's <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195607.Reader_s_Block" target="Reader's Block">Reader's Block</a></i>. The above is a paraphrase of his entry.]JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-21156012124555057062023-02-06T07:03:00.000-08:002023-02-06T07:03:02.761-08:00looking vs. seeingWhat this exercise [spend a full 3 hours in front of a painting, recording your observations] shows students is that just because you have <i>looked</i> at something doesn’t mean that you have <i>seen</i> it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms: access is not synonymous with learning. What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience.
<br /><br />
The art historian David Joselit has described paintings as deep reservoirs of temporal experience—“time batteries”—“exorbitant stockpiles” of experience and information. I would suggest that the same holds true for anything a student might want to study at Harvard University—a star, a sonnet, a chromosome. There are infinite depths of information at any point in the students’ education. They just need to take the time to unlock that wealth.
<br /><br />
—Jennifer L. Roberts, "<a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-power-of-patience" target="Power of Patience">The Power of Patience</a>"<br />
Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-10380985102958290252023-01-16T09:53:00.004-08:002023-01-16T09:53:47.798-08:00things begin to appearMy poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These <i>objets trouvés</i> of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge. That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.
<br /><br />
—Charles Simic, "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy," <i>Wonderful Words, Silent Truth</i> (Poets on Poetry series, U. of Michigan Press, 1990)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-55919038226081713212022-11-07T08:00:00.001-08:002022-11-07T09:43:15.737-08:00essential thingsYeats saw the things of this world differently; he was an essentialist. In the men and the women he knew—both those he loved and those he hated—as well as in swans, hares, swords, and towers, he spied some changeless and irreducible essence. He was a Realist in the medieval sense. He believed that universals are real, that those abstract terms by which we categorize entities—Man or Woman, Beauty or Liberty, Swan or Goose—possess the fullest measure of genuine existence in sone suprasensual realm, and that the earthly embodiments of these transcendent archetypes are but momentary instantiations.
<br /><br />
—Eric Ormsby, “Passionate Syntax,” <i><a href="https://nes.princeton.edu/publications/fine-incisions-essays-poetry-and-place" target="Fine Incisions">Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place</a></i> (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-86448253537871935002022-09-03T06:37:00.004-07:002022-09-19T10:39:44.268-07:00community of objectivesIt is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.
<br /><br />
—Mark Rothko, <i><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300115857/the-artists-reality/" target="The Artist's Reality">The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art</a></i> (Yale Univ. Press, 2012)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-57886044869003158392022-08-18T09:15:00.002-07:002022-08-25T14:49:33.762-07:00language like pigmentsit is easier now to follow the inner flow beneath these scraps of language, to appreciate the simple clarity of the sentences he has constructed, to recognize that these meditations (for they have never been anything else) move not in the manner of events or in the manner of a river or in the manner, either, of thought, or in the “happy hour” fashion of the told tale (each brought so beautifully together in “Boat Trip,” one of the triumphs of Walser’s art), but in the way of an almost inarticulate metaphysical feeling; a response to the moves and meanings of both human life and nature, which is purged of every local note and self-interested particularity and which achieves, like the purest poetry, an understanding mix of longing, appreciation, and despair, as if they were the pigments composing a color to lay down upon the surface of something passing—sweetly regretful—like the fall of light upon a bit of lost water, or a gleam caught in a fold of twilit snow, as if it were going to remain there forever.
<br /><br />
—William Gass, “Robert Walser,” <i>Finding A Form: Essays</i> (Knopf, 1996)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-41246174871164332512022-08-05T09:17:00.002-07:002022-08-05T09:18:20.029-07:00event not recordA poem is an event, not a record of an event.<br /><br />
—Robert Lowell
<br /><br />
Quoted in <i>Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs</i> (U. of Michigan Press, 1988), edited by Jeffrey Meyers, 304.
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-46784556815293826982022-07-27T07:47:00.006-07:002022-07-27T07:54:54.948-07:00instead of blindly stumblingWhat produces all philosophical treatises and poems and scriptures is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance.
<br /><br />
—George Bernard Shaw, <i>Epigrams of Bernard Shaw</i> (Haldeman-Julius Co., 1925)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-27565187901487362692022-03-28T13:39:00.001-07:002022-03-28T13:39:06.284-07:00by indirect meansThe relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.<br />
<br />
—Richard Wilbur, <i>Quarterly Review of Literature</i>, 7, p.189
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-13908046861500356762022-03-22T16:21:00.001-07:002022-03-22T16:21:24.353-07:00what a pitySometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."
<br /><br />
―Jorge Luis Borges, <i><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674008205" target="This Craft of Verse">This Craft of Verse</a></i> (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-53478667798521082802022-03-21T18:32:00.000-07:002022-03-21T18:32:03.310-07:00straightforward and quirkyThere was a savior who rescued me from the Romantic complexities and showed me that I could love poetry in English: Carl Sandburg, my first American poet. He was quite popular at the time, and a classmate introduced me to one of his volumes. Here were poems I could understand, written in free verse, in plain, idiomatic American English. They were straightforward and, at the same time, quirky and mysterious. Their spirit was democratic and deeply humane...
<br /><br />
—Lisel Mueller, <i>
First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them</i> (Simon & Schuster, 2000), edited by
Carmela Ciuraru.
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-1493122207301686452022-02-21T11:00:00.001-08:002022-02-21T11:14:07.614-08:00trope and schemeThe study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.
<br /><br />
—John Hollander, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300206296/rhymes-reason" target="Rhymes's Reason"><i>Rhyme's Reason</i></a>
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-82707888796093396712022-01-22T09:51:00.003-08:002022-01-22T09:51:29.059-08:00education in publicAllen Tate said, describing his own critical essays, “I simply conducted my education in public.”<br /><br />
Quoted in “The Exercise of Reverence,” <i>Essays on Poetry</i> (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003) by Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-88340389019043361022021-11-08T13:25:00.004-08:002021-11-08T13:25:45.530-08:00harem of wordsHe kept as it were a harem of words, to which he was constant and absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more than others, but he neglected none. He used them more often out of compliment than of necessity.
<br /><br />
—Edward Thomas, speaking of Swinburne, <i>Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Critical Study</i> (Mitchell Kennerley, 1912)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-84283007878435610472021-09-08T07:18:00.005-07:002021-09-08T07:18:39.897-07:00each wordIn a poem, each word has to be right and contribute to the whole; in a story only every sentence. In a novel only every page.
<br /><br />
—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/books/alison-lurie-dead.html" target="A Laurie">Alison Laurie</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/397788.Real_People" target="Real People">Real People</a> (Penguin, 1978)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-51995197551449993242021-08-13T16:14:00.007-07:002021-08-13T16:21:54.420-07:00more fully in versePoetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinions—hard as rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting.<br /><br />
—Thomas Hardy<br />
[Notebook entry, 17 October 1896]
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-89020868886849602812021-01-25T09:17:00.001-08:002021-01-25T09:18:01.805-08:00poems of anonymousWhen, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
<br /><br />
—Virginia Woolf, <i>A Room of One's Own</i> (1929)
JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983163211450024302.post-35018774625208519212020-11-14T15:23:00.006-08:002022-01-22T09:54:11.144-08:00no echoesSlowly from nice neat letters;<br />
doing things well<br />
is more important than doing them.
<br /><br />
--
<br /><br />
Wake up singers!<br />
Time for the echoes to end<br />
and the voices to begin.<br />
<br />
--
<br /><br >
Quarreler, boxer<br />
fight it out with the wind.<br />
It’s not the fundamental <i>I</i><br />
that the poet is searching for<br />
but the essential <i>you</i>.
<br /><br />
—Antonio Machado, <i><a href="https://www.cbsd.com/9781893996663/there-is-no-road/" target="No road">There is No Road</a></i> (White Pine Press, 2003), Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney translators.JforJameshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17178504373218996278noreply@blogger.com0