invention of a barbarous age

Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them.

—John Milton, "The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime," introduction to 1674 edition of Paradise Lost

la grande permission

Years ago I interviewed John Ashbery for the Irish Times. He was reading in a small market town to the south of Dublin. It took me about an hour to drive down. It was a drizzling, shimmering spring afternoon. Many of his answers about his work and his aesthetic were eloquent. One in particular stuck with me for years. I asked him whether he was a surrealist and he told me that he himself had asked the French poet Henri Michuax the same question. No, Michaux replied, he was not a surrealist. But, for him, surrealism had been la grande permission.

—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)

admire black

One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it. It does not please the eye and awakens no sensuality. It is an agent of the spirit far more than the fine color of the palette or the prism.

—Odilon Redon, quoted in Alfred Werner’s introduction to The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon (Dover, 1969)

language power

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

—Adrienne Rich, introduction to The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn, 1964-1977

no edges

Poets have always known that one's education has no edges, has no end, is not separated out and cannot be separated out in any way, and is full of strength because one refuses to have it separated out.

—Muriel Rukeyser, "The Education of the Poet," The Writer and Her Work (W.W. Norton, 1980), edited by Janet Sternburg

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”

unread books

The art of tsundoku, which made you buy books that you wouldn't necessarily read, but that you just had to have. To have them there, not reading them, but so you were able to read other books in peace. [445]

—Rodrigo Fresán, The Remembered Past (Open Letter Books, 2022), translated by Will Vanderhyden

prose bewitched

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

—Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry” (1925), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1959, edited by Melissa Kwasny.

Editor’s headnote: “Loy—promoter of futurism, feminism, and modernism—did not publish much criticism. Yet this essay, which appeared in Charm, a women’s fashion magazine, conveys the sense of literary life in New York in the middle of a revolution [modernism].

build eternity into a poem

[David Wojahn says this was written on the back of an envelope by the poet Larry Levis, so I've tried to lay it out in that way, and the punctuation is based on my hearing Wojahn read these words.]

I think I might build eternity
into a poem one brick, one
brush of the pen at a time.
An argument against one
contradiction or the next,
until it stares out like the
sphinx past everyone but me.
After all I wrote it. I'm
forty-seven. My mind,
my thought, have never felt
so passionate, so shapely,
or as free of ideologies.
Poetry underwrites
consideration of all else.
I am what made me. I am not.

—Larry Levis, a statement read by David Wojahn in the documentary A Late Style of Fire

incidental happiness

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it; but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, “Here it is!” like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the American Note-Books (1879)

quicker that way too

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

—Sydney Smith (1771-1845), essayist and clergyman, quoted by Hesketh Pearson in The Smith of Smiths: Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (1934)

no keys

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from “Ars Poetica?” in The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (Ecco Press, 1988)

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