Conjectures At Random

fossil poetry

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (Essays: Second Series, 1844)

can't take out anything

Disce quod ignoras: Marsi doctique Pedonis
saepe duplex unum pagina tractat opus.
Non sunt longa quibus nihil est quod demere possis,
sed tu, Cosconi, disticha longa facis.

Learn what you don't know: one work of (Domitius) Marsus or
learned Pedo
often stretches out over a doublesided page.
A work isn't long if you can't take anything out of it,
but you, Cosconius, write even a couplet too long.

—Martial

eschews metaphor

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, and personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Basho said: "Learn of the pine from a pine." Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Basho meant.

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957)

greater reality

A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.

—Theodore Roethke, Straw For The Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday & Co., 1972), edited by David Wagoner

nothing ugly

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, without inner or outer truth.

—Auguste Rodin

not permitted to turn away

First, artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not permitted to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. (Paris, 1907)

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne, translated by Joel Agee

fulcrum of its own body

Shakespeare’s intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont or Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or a passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.

—S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk (1834)

everything contemporary

If he doesn’t put down the contemporary thing, he isn’t a great writer, for he has to live in the past. That is what I mean by “everything is contemporary.” The minor poets of the period, or the precious poets of the period, are all people who are under the shadow of the past. A man who is making a revolution has to be contemporary. A minor person can live in the imagination.

—Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written: Volume II of the Uncollected Writing of Gertrude Stein (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), edited by Robert Bartlett Haas

emotionless sentence

a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is

—Gertrude Stein, How to Write

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)

defamiliarization or ostranenie

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

—Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis, (U. of Nebraska Press, 1965, p12)

ancient and new shards

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. (#24)

—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms, translation by Behler & Struc (Penn. State U. Press, 1968)

to be and not to be

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was named thus. (#114)

—Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms, translation by Behler & Struc (Penn. State U. Press, 1968)

words to thank

Poets, priests and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions

—The Police, "De Do Do Do"

footnotes to the world

There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.

—George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Realms of Being (Columbia U. Press, 1940)

fugitive presence

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

—Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005)

line by line

Finally, no particular line is valuable except inasmuch as it performs a dramatic function in relationship to other lines in a particular poem: one kind of line ending becomes powerful because of its relationship to other kinds of line endings.

—James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf 2008)

duende

Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unknown accents.

—Federico Garcia Lorca, "Play and Theory of the Duende," lecture in Buenos Aires, 1933

immediate contact

Intuition can only operate by an immediate contact with the thing. In poetry what in logic are called subjective and objective are united. There is no observer and thing observed, both are one; the poet is the bird, the flower, the tree, the Pope (Browning in “The Ring and the Book”), the ship (Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner”), and anything else to which he is able to join himself. And if this union does not take place there can be no poetry.

—Michael Oakeshott, “Philosophy, Poetry and Reality,” What is History? (Imprint Academic, 2004)

step barefoot into reality

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of
    life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
     among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
     reality,

They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens

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)

no penalty for poems

In Our Time

In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.

—Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

multum in parvo

The phrase multum in parvo has always had a special significance for me. In its terse and compact Latin diction, it exemplifies exactly what it connotes: much in little. The archetype of brevity, however, is not easy to define. Abstraction, conciseness, symbolism, and imaginative potential are basic in the concept. A multiplicity of detail is concentrated into a unified principle, the particular is transformed into the universal, a largeness of meaning is conveyed with the utmost economy of means. This largeness of meaning should be accomplished by a dramatic impact, in a word: insight with a gasp.

—Carl Zigrosser, Multum In Parvo (George Braziller, 1965)

hidden place

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

vague and indeterminate

The Italian poet Leopardi believed that vagueness was an essential characteristic of poetry, allowing the mind to "wander in the realm of the vague and indeterminate, in the realm of those childlike ideas which are born out of the ignorance of the whole.”

See G. Singh’s wonderful book, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry (U. of Kentucky Press, 1964). Singh writes: “It is because the poet is attracted to what is vague and indefinite, more than what is clear, concrete, and precise, that his language, even when it does not contain a full-fledged image or simile or metaphor, does to a certain extent partake of the character of an image or a symbol, both saying and suggesting something much more than what it commonly would outside of poetry.”

consolation of poetry

Poets and intellectuals–who are paid little, and who are usually ignored by the general population–have this consolation, at least: they are the ones the tyrants go after first.

—Frederick Smock, “Poetry & Compassion," Poetry and Compassion—Essays on Art and Craft (Wind Publications, 2006)

way through emotion

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling...A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually--that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too--but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, ch. 1

proper names

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

—W.H. Auden, A Certain World, 1970

just run

I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

—Frank O'Hara, "Personism"

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin

negative capability

...several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…

—John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, Dec. 21, 1817

behind painting

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage.

—Brion Gysin,"Cut-Ups Self-Explained," Let the Mice In (Something Else Press, 1973) edited by Jan Herman

too many tools

Nothing so hampers creativity as having all the right tools.

—James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2000)

ordinary mythos

when my central image is a wind-screen wiper, I feel myself just as mythopoeic as if I were writing about the Grael.

—Louis MacNeice, Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words, edited by Clare Brown & Don Paterson (Picador, 2003)

defense of folly

Every defense of poetry is a defense of folly.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

mentally prepared

It is fine to be mentally prepared at every moment that every object and every being shall bring to you some new revelation.

—Rudolf Steiner

understand vaguely

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

—Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"

ahead of its time

And poetry, which is generally ahead of its time, may go so far ahead as to seem behind in time.

—Eugenio Montale, Poet In Our Time (Marion Boyars, 1979)

wordum wrixlan

Together with alliteration and formulaic phrasing, Old English poetry used patterns of repetition, echo, and interlacement to create powerfully resonant blocks of verse. There is an aesthetic quality to this poetry, a quality of intricate word weaving that moves the reader, or the listener, through the narrative or descriptive moment. In fact, one of the expressions used for making poetry in Old English was wordum wrixlan—to weave together words. There was a fabric of language for the Anglo-Saxons, a patterning of sounds and sense that matched the intricate patterning of their visual arts: serpentine designs and complex interlocking geometric form in manuscript illumination or in metalwork are the visual equivalent of the interlocking patterns of the verse.

—Seth Lerer, “Caedmon Learns to Sing,” Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007)

political poetry

there is a truth behind the assertion that poetry and politics don't mix, but one so warped it turns on itself. The truth is that much of what is called political poetry...is hackwork. From this comes the generalization that politics destroys poetry. Yet isn't that an arbitrary conclusion? Most any kind of poetry is hackwork, is slipshod, undemanding of itself. The work of idle hands that are maybe not idle enough. When you come upon an inept love poem you aren't likely to conclude that love and poetry don't mix. You may think the poet a bad poet, or even a callow person. And you may pass judgment on the work. But you won't jump to generalizations about the incompatibility of love and poetry.

—James Scully's "Remarks on Political Poetry," Line Break (Bay Press, 1988)

rejection slip

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

—Samuel Johnson

misprint

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

—Oscar Wilde, “The Children of the Poets”

integrity

...the poet makes no specific statements of fact, and hence is not judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says. The poet...is judged by the integrity or consistency of his verbal structure. The reason is that he imitates the universal, not the particular; he is concerned not with what happened but with what happens.

—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (Harcourt, 1963)

accuracy of observation

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

—Wallace Stevens

et in arcadia ego

and they shall read on the beautiful square monument
the inscription that chills my heart at all hours,
that makes me strangle so much sorrow in my breast.

—Jacopo Sannazano (1458-1530), Italian poet, Arcadia, 1502

Et in Arcadia ego: 'Even in Arcadia I am', this Latin phrase implies that death comes even in a place of great beauty and ease. The painting above, by Nicolas Poussin(1594–1665), is titled "Et in Arcadia ego."

permanently contemporary

Poets worth reading usually believe things the age they live in no longer does. Poets are always anachronistic, obsolete, unfashionable, and permanently contemporary.

—Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Ausable Press, 2008)

destiny of speech

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. In trying to sharpen the awareness of language at the level of poems, we get the impression that we are touching the man whose speech is new in that it is not limited to expressing ideas or sensations, but tries to have a future. One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

what's he building in there? —Tom Waits

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what's he building in there?
—Tom Waits