under one small star

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

[…]

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Couple of lines from the poem “Under One Small Star” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

to see a soul

“Quem não vê bem uma palavra, não pode ver bem uma alma."

"One who cannot see a word well, cannot see a soul well."

—Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)

beginning and end

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, moulded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 to 1832)

[A favorite quote of the Edward Hopper who said it applied equally to painting.]

critic struck dumb

To create a work of art that the critic cannot even talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern.

—John Ashbery, Art News, May 1972

threadbare language

How threadbare the language of happiness!

—Osip Mandelstam, from poem “Tristia,” Osip Mandelstam: The Eyesight of Wasps (Ohio State U. Press, 1989), translated by James Greene

speaking voice

My voice excites me, my pen never.

—Margaret Fuller quoted in this review of Bright Circle Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism

sleepy family habits

Miss Stein is bringing back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined groups of words, their sleepy family habits; then she rebrightens them, examines their texture, and builds them into new and vital shapes.

—Edith Sitwell, Poetry and Criticism (Hogarth Essays No.11, Hogarth Press, 1925)

poems are lumps

Poems are lumps—physical entities. This does not mean, of course, that they are not about something—the complete dependence of all the paths, the threads, time-space, History, the Social. And the more unrestrainedly the poet gives himself up to the materiality, the more precisely these lumps give off the quality of his conscious effort, of his opinions and ideas. Which is far more interesting than the opinions and ideas themselves—only physical submission shows how long the succession is, demonstrates their real drama.

—Per Kirkeby, “Painterly Poetry,” Selected Essays from Bravura (Van Abbemuseum, 1982)

perfect title

I hit upon Edwin Arlington Robinson’s beautiful and powerful poem “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man From Stratford,” a philosophical and critical monologue in the grand manner which I have read, I imagine, at least thirty times, and then I read again Robinson’s “The Man Against the Sky,” a poem with so perfect a title that you foreknow all it will contain.

—Burton Rascoe, A Bookman’s Daybook (Horace Liveright, 1929), edited by C. Hartley Gratton [79]