living part

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life.

I believe content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery. The revelation of form itself can be a deep joy; yet I think form as means should never obtrude, whether from invention or carelessness, between the reader and the essential force of the poem, it must be so fused with that force.

—Denise Levertov, from her statement for Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960.

erotics of art

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort which dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

[…]

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

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In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

—Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1964), Susan Sontag: Essays of 1960s & 70s, (The Library of America, 2013)

non linear

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)

[No source found, but quoted as epigraph to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.]

feeling for fragment

Our feeling for fragment as form is an explanation of free verse.

—J.V. Cunningham
(Quote comes from the class notes recorded by D.G. Myers in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar taught by J.V. Cunninghan in 1976.)

form and thought

A discipline in form is a discipline in thought.

—Stanley Fish, How to Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper, 2011)

phenomenon of becoming

Form is not static but a phenomenon of becoming.

—Jean Ladrière (Belgian philosopher), quote encountered at Lee Ufan's retrospective show Marking Infinity at the Guggenheim Museum in October 2011.

body forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969)

form ever follows function

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

—Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896)