the rest is literature

Let music be, more of it and always!
Let your verse be the thing in motion
Which one feels who flees from an altering soul,
Towards other skies to other loves.

Let your verse be the happy occurrence,
Somehow within the restless morning wind,
Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme...
And all the rest is literature.

—Paul Verlaine, "Art Poétique," translation by Eli Siegel

tissue of quotations

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author/God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

—Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), trans. S. Heath.

imagination and madness

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

grasp the words

“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

—Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose

right noun

Almost any noun is better alone than chaperoned if it’s the right noun, and very few can stand two adjectives. ‘Unsettled dream’ is stronger than ‘unsettled white dream’.

—Ezra Pound, in letter to Parker Tyler, May 1935.

no key

     Someone said to me about Pasternak’s poems: ‘Splendid poems when you explain them all like that, but they need a key supplied with them.’
     No, not supply a key to the poems (dreams), but the poems themselves are a key to understanding everything. But from understanding to accepting there isn’t just a step, there is no step at all; to understand is to accept, there is no other understanding, any other understanding is non-understanding. Not in vain does the French comprendre mean both ‘understand’ and ‘encompass’—that is, ‘accept’ and ‘include’.

—Marina Tsvetaeva, from title essay of Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), introduced and translated by Angela Livingstone, p. 173.

begins in conflict

A poet's life begins in conflict with the whole of existence.

—Søren Kierkegaard

corner of your eye

Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all....It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.

—William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl (U. of Michigan Press, 1978)

small worlds

Kleinkunst in German refers to a so-called art of small forms, “little art,” in other words.
[…]
By “small forms” in literature, we generally understand various types of prose works of short length. These might include short stories, sketches, anecdotes, essays, reviews, feuilletons, and aphorisms. They were, to be sure, cultivated at a time when large novels, full-length plays, and fine poetry of every hue and stamp were being written...But the modernist upheaval in the arts beginning at the turn of the century [19 to 20th] created a climate of experimentation and innovation of far-reaching consequences for all literary creativity. Structural and linguistic transformations of conventional literary genres, from novel to poem, was also accompanied by a spurning of these genres by writers who were attracted to, and sought to make their niche in, the emerging world of literary small forms.

The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938 (Purdue U. Press, 1993) by Harold B. Segel

only ear

Have I still ears? Am I only ear, and nothing else besides?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).

integral

music

∫

speech

An integral

Lower limit speech

Upper limit music

—Louis Zukofsky

scope in a single subject

One of the most daring paradoxical minds, Lucian of Samosata, defined, as early as the second century AD, the concept of creation. In discussing a painting by the Greek master Zeuxis, he justified the singularity of the masterpiece, which is not only a token of skills, but has as much to do with the expression of a vision: “There are no doubt qualities in the painting which evade analysis by a mere amateur, and yet involve supreme craftsmanship—such things as precision of line, perfect mastery of the palette, clever brushwork, management of shadow, perspective, proportion, and relation of part to the whole; but I leave that to the professionals whose business it is to appreciate it; what strikes me especially about Zeuxis is the manifold scope which he has found for his extraordinary skill, in a single subject.”

—Lucian of Samosata, “Zeuxis and Antiochus,” Works of Lucian, Vol. II (Clarendon Press, 1905), translated by H. W. Fowler.

[Quote found in Donatien Grau’s The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

dead color

When I saw Degas again, he happened to have a box of pastels in his hand, and was spreading them out on a board in front of the window. Seeing me watching him:
—I take all the color out of them that I can, by putting them in the sun.
—But what do you use, then to get colors of such brightness?
—Dead color, Monsieur.

—Ambroise Vollard (1886-1939, an important French art dealer) recounting Paul Cézanne's conversation with Edgar Degas.

[n.b.: quote was encountered yesterday as the epigraph to a limited edition of Charles Wright's poetry called Dead Color (Meadow Press for Charles Seluzicki, Fine Books, Salem OR, 1980)]

joyce's motto

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

injured poem

Once the poem is released, how little the poet owns it, or, indeed, matters to the poem. The poem has always been injured by the poet. Never, by man or woman, has it been fully released to its potential. Christopher Marlowe spoke for every poet when he wrote long ago in “Tamburlaine the Great” (and this is my favorite statement of what happens to a poem between its conception and its execution):

    If all the pens that ever poets held
    Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
    And every sweetness that inspir’d their hearts,
    Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
    If all the heavenly quintessence they still
    From their immortal flowers of poesy,
    Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
    The highest reaches of a human wit;
    If these had made one poem’s period,
    And all combin’d in beauty’s worthiness,
    Yet should there hover in their restless minds
    One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
    Which into words no virtue can digest.

Always, the struggle is to help the poem release itself from things it cannot, in various stages, do without: publishers, editors, critics, funds, sponsors. Always the effort must be to shift the emphasis back to where it belongs, to the poem, which, though injured and subjected to the thousand ills print is heir to, must escape and survive.

—Josephine Jacobsen, “From Anne to Marianne: Some Women in American Poetry,” Two Lectures (The Library of Congress pamphlet, 1973)

unimproved

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

—Giacomo Leopardi, “Zibaldone di pensieri” (Poetry: November 1, 2010) translated from the Italian by W.S. Di Piero.

return to song

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

—Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016

the truth is

"The truth is like poetry—And most people fucking hate poetry," (Overheard in a Washington D.C. bar) quoted by Michael Lewis in The Big Short.

proceeding before one’s eyes

Like his thoughts Stevens' poems exist in the present moment; one has a sense while reading him that creation is proceeding before one’s eyes. The whole is a continuous process, not a ‘talking about’ but a living thing, so that in a most extraordinary and exciting way one receives through the aesthetic sense an impression of pure potency.

—Geoffrey Moore, "Wallace Stevens: A Hero of Our Time," The Achievement of Wallace Stevens (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1962), edited by Ashley Brown and Robert S. Haller.

ars longa

Richard Porson on Southey’s Thalaba: One of those poems “which will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but not till then.”

Commonplace Book, 1934-2012 (Pressed Wafer, 2015) by Daniel Aaron.

taste making

[Every] author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.

—William Wordsworth, "Essay Supplemental to the Preface" (1815)

Quoted in J. D. McClatchy's Sweet Theft: a poet's commonplace book (Counterpoint Press, 2016)

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.

self aware

Of his story, The Altar of the Dead, Henry James observed that it was on a theme which had been bothering him for years, but of which the artistic legitimacy was suspect; he had to write it, but he knew it to be pitched in a richly sentimental key which, under the hands of another, he might have condemned. His story, The Turn of the Screw, surely one of the finest ghost stories in any language, he frankly derided as a potboiler, making no reservations for its brilliance. He was, of course, right in both of these opinions: he was a better judge of Henry James than any other critic has been, he knew his parerga when he saw them, he could afford to wave them blandly aside. We should think, perhaps, a little less of him, as we are tempted to do of any artist, if he had taken his parerga too seriously—if he had appeared to see only dimly, or not at all, any distinction between these things, which were carved from stones flawed at the outset, and those others, which no flaw rebukes.

—Conrad Aiken, A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present (Meridian Books, 1958)

window moment

Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them—they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window's increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas.

—Jane Hirshfield, "Close Reading: Windows," Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.)

long poem about everything

Don't you love the Oxford dictionary? When I first read it I thought it was a really long poem about everything.

—David Bowie, BowieNet LiveChat, 4/27/1999.

not for tourists

I know who poetry can't accommodate: the tourist. I don't mean it is necessarily more highborn than shell art, though the effort, the ardor of it goes toward being borne up. But I believe it can't be identified with the compulsion to shop instead of the desire to touch, be touched.

—C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.

—W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (Vintage Books/Random House, 1989)

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.

-10-

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)

alienated majesty

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays: First Series (1841)

vulgar error

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.

pro pruning

Any fool can cut a bad line. It takes a real pro to cut a good line.

—Theodore Roethke, quoted in Carolyn Kizer’s foreword to Theodore Roethke on Poetry and Craft (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

prose errand

I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand.

—John Ciardi, quoted in Edward Cefelli's introduction to Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays on Reading, Writing, and Teaching Poetry (U. of Arkansas Press, 1989)

essentially anonymous

A work of art has an author, and yet, when it is perfect, there is something essentially anonymous about it. It imitates the anonymity of divine art.

—Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader (David McKay, 1977), ed. George Panichas

strains and stains

Having verse set to music is like looking at a painting through a stained-glass window.

—Paul Valéry

invent it

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living, and from every other expression of man’s nature, poetry would be—I cannot say invented or discovered—poetry would be derived.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974)

critics' poet

As Henry James has required already, so Stevens will require the work of many an esthetic theorist and analyst to educate his public of the future. Supplementing the old dichotomy of the “readers’ poet” and the “poets’ poet,” it is possible to coin for Stevens a third category, that of the “critics’ poet.” The universities will have their joy explaining him long after the more popular poets are deservedly forgotten.

—Peter Viereck, “Some Notes On Wallace Stevens,” The Trinity Review (Vol. VIII, No. 3, May 1954)

third poetry

The first poetry is always written by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who have learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art into one thing.

—Walter Anderson (1903-1965), American painter, writer and naturalist.

image explains

End with an image and don’t explain.

—Stanley Kunitz (no citation, but quoted in many places).

partisan of truth

The poet looks over a broad terrain and over vast stretches of time. He makes observations on the problems of his own time, to be sure, but he is a partisan only in the sense that he is a partisan of the truth. He arouses doubts and uncertainties and brings everything into question.

—Zbigniew Herbert, quoted in “Objects Don’t Lie: Talk with a Polish Poet” by Stephen Stepanchev, The New Leader, Vol. 51, August 1968, No. 16.

step aside

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

—W. Somerset Maugham, Saturday Review, 20 July 1957.

twenty-fifth poem

P.S.: Do you in constructing your books generally have that idea of coherence in mind?

Wright: Every time. Did I mention to you Robert Frost's remark — it is a very Horatian remark — that if you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth? And I have tried that every time, every time.

—James Wright, interview with Peter Stitt, James Wright: A Profile (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1988) edited by Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt.

three names

I may interpolate here that there has been a strong implication by gentlemen reviewers that there is something intrinsically humorous and definitive, in the worst sense, about the three-name woman poet. And indeed, a great number of the triple-threat ladies have been very, very bad. If, however, the poetic stature of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or William Butler Yeats, for example, has been pegged to the number of their employed names, I have not observed it.

—Josephine Jacobsen, "From Anne to Marianne", Two Lectures (Library of Congress pamphlet, 1973)

virtue of patience

LEVINE: I was unable to write any poetry about my working life while that was my working life. I tried a few times. And the poems were hysterical. I think they were just - you know, I couldn't control them. My anger was so overwhelming that I couldn't cope with it, just as I couldn't write about my boyhood very effectively until I was 40. It was still too powerful for me. But I'm patient, so I hung in there. And that's probably by chief virtue as a writer is my patience. So I waited, and I kept trying to write about factory work but I kept throwing the poems away. And the first poem I ever published about working in a factory, I was, I think, 31 or 2, but I don't like the poem anymore.

GROSS: Can you give me a sense of what was going wrong in the factory poems when you were still there? Is there anything...

LEVINE: Yes, I can. The language was overblown. You know, I wanted to use the word ‘eternity’ and - you know. I wanted to use a kind of Latin diction to - almost a Miltonic diction and a great chorus - build up a great chorus of sound and - to dramatize the horror show of some of the places I had worked. And I didn't have any - there was no tenderness in it for the people that I worked with. There was no - and that was a, you know - that was part of the reward that I got for those years was the people I was meeting, even though you didn't talk to them that much because places were often so loud. But you'd meet them afterwards or you'd make friends with them and spend time with them. And they weren't getting in the poems at all. The poems were, you know, my poor soul being hammered out of shape by General Motors. And they were a bit self-indulged.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, 1991.

all things done splendidly

When I first knew [William] Morris nothing could content him but being a monk, and getting to Rome, and then he must be an architect, and apprenticed himself to Street, and worked for two years, but when I came to London and began to paint he threw it all up, and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and then he must give it up and make window hangings and pretty things, and when he achieved that, he must be a poet again, and then after two or three years of Earthly Paradise time, he must learn dyeing, and lived in a vat, and learned weaving, and knew all about looms, and then made more books, and learned tapestry, and then wanted to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for, and to make wonderfully rich-looking books—and all things he does splendidly—and if he lives the printing will have an end, but not I hope, before Chaucer and the Morte d’Arthur are done; then he’ll do I don’t know what, but every minute will be alive.

—Edward Burns-Jones, c.1890, quoted in Time Remembered‎ (1933) by Frances Horner, p. 14., and in William Morris: Words & Wisdom (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2014)

died of being himself

In 1896 William Morris died at the age of sixty-two. Morris was one of the most talented and respected figures in the Victorian Era, but the superhuman range and pace of his vocations—painter, architect, designer, craftsman, writer, book-maker, socialist crusader—caused one physician to attribute his death to "simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."

http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/3/1896

feeling things

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.

—Wei T’ai, (A poet of Sung Dynasty cited in A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang), quoted by Charles Reznikoff.

world without bells

Poetry shouldn’t tell us what we already know, though of course it can revive what we think we know. A durable poet, the rarest of all birds, has a unique point of view and the gift of language to express it. The unique point of view can often come from a mental or physical deformity. Deep within us, but also on the surface, is the wounded ugly boy who has never caught an acceptable angle of himself in the mirror. A poet can have a deep sense of himself as a Quasimodo in a world without bells, or as the fine poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote:

     A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
     A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

—Jim Harrison, “King of Pain,” review of The Pleasures of the Damned, Poems, 1951-1993 by Charles Bukowski, in The New York Times Book Review (November 25, 2007).

period style

May a poet write as a poet or must he write as a period? For modernism, in this perverted sense, likewise becomes a critical tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry instead of freeing the poet of obligation to conform to any particular set of literary theories."

—Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927)

room to be yourself

“For the power you so dearly aspire to, Levine, you must turn to the master, Milton, the most powerful poet in the language, though you might do well to avoid Latinate vocabulary. Have you studied Latin? Levine: “No.” “You might consider doing so; that way you’ll know what to avoid when you’re stealing from Milton. Do you have another favorite among your contemporaries?” Levine: “Dylan Thomas.” Berryman: “It doesn’t show, Levine, it doesn’t show. You’ve done a superb job of masking that particular debt. How have you managed that?” Levine: “I didn’t. I wrote through my Dylan Thomas phase and quit. It was impossible for me to write under his influence and not sound exactly like him except terrible.” Berryman: “Levine, you’ve hit upon a truth. Certain poets are so much themselves they should not be imitated: they leave you no room to be yourself, and Thomas was surely one of them, as was Hart Crane, who probably ruined the careers of more young poets than anything except booze. Levine, you might go to the source of Dylan’s own lyrical mysticism, and who would that be?” Silence. “Mr. Justice?” Justice: “Blake.” “Exactly, you might go to Blake, who is so impossibly lyrical and inventive no one in the world has the talent to sound like him.” In an unusually hushed voice he recited all of Blake’s early “Mad Song,” ending:

     I turn my back to the east
     From whence comforts have increas’d;
     For light doth seize my brain
     With frantic pain.

“Better to learn from a poet who does not intoxicate you,” said Berryman, “better to immerse yourself in Hardy, whom no American poet wants to sound like. A great poet seldom read.”

—Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” The Bread of Time (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

words go through us

A poet’s words go through us and through us. And that’s causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 155.

[Cited in The Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature by Angus Fletcher]