unfinished yet whole

What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum.…It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

—Louise Glück, "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

collecting pebbles

Art relies on the conversion of even flaws and defects into positive aesthetic values. It is a strange hymn to stupidity.

* * *

Collecting pebbles for a new mosaic of a world that I could love.

From In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska, selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

the likes of him

“1845-1847 - Quoil’s Deserted House”:

He was here, the likes of him, for a season, standing light in his shoes like a faded gentleman, with gesture almost learned in drawing-rooms; wore clothes, hat, shoes, cut ditches, felled wood, did farm work for various people, kindled fires, worked enough, ate enough, drank too much. He was one of those unnamed, countless sects of philosophers who founded no school.

"The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Houghton Mifflin & Co.,1906). Journal VIII edited by Bradford Torrey [The small and much mutilated journal which begins here appears to belong to the Walden period (1845-1847), but the entries are undated.]

begins and ends in silence

Much of a monk's life is spent in silence. Much of poet's life is spent in silence, too—a poet spends a fraction of his time actually writing poems. [Thomas] Merton was both a monk and a poet, and thus well-acquainted with silence. Like meditation, and like prayer, poetry is surrounded by silence. Poetry begins and ends in silence. Silence is also inherent within the poem, like the silences between notes in music.

—Frederick Smock, “Merton and Silence,” The Merton Journal, 2008, volume 15 number 1

musical thought

A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world.

—Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet”