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"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." (William Wordsworth) "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, an escape from personality." "The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a superior wisdom--and yet, if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it. Is this what it is to have conquered despair?" (Kierkegaard, Journals)
Louise Gluck, "The Red Poppy" "We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn." (M. L'Engle)
( "I have the sensation that the most honest man in the world is the artist when he is saying I don't know. At such moments he knows that, to the questions that truly interest him, only the work will give answers, which usually turn out further questions." (Clark Coolidge, Teaching Writing Creatively, ed. David Starkey )
"Facing the day is something a person does every day… (Molly Peacock, Boulevard, Nos. 53 & 54, Spring 2003) "Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me. Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer--a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen." (Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Fronter
Why do you think you are repeatedly drawn to dangerous subjects in your work? The conventional does not amuse or sustain me. I must have thrill. I need it for my work. I have a scientific perspective and recognize in a way most artists don't that we are living in post-historical times. It's a historical singularity. We are the event horizon. The ordinary laws, expectations, rewards, admonishments, taboos, borders, all the fundamental assumptions are irrelevant. As a character says in my San Francisco Noir (new Akashic anthology, edited by the above mentioned and ever charming Peter Maravelis) story, "The Neutral Zone" -- my most recent and most truly, shockingly autobiographical story, it shocks me -- "Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We're too hip for that shit. It's residual static from a Baptist radio broadcast in Mississippi. Irrelevant and obsolete." --Kate Braverman, Bookslut ". . .the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it." (Ernest Hemingway) "I'm the subject," he stated, when explaining how he related to his creativity: "I'm also the verb as I paint, but I'm also the object. I am the complete sentence." Richard Shiff on the painter Barnett Newman, Common Language, Fall 2003. "At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement." (Ray Carver, "On Writing.") There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree. (Russell Edson, "The Fall") "We live inside an enormous novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. [The novelist has] no moral stance, being akin to a scientist. faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts." (J. G. Ballard in the introduction to Crash, 1973.) "A poet is a penguin—his wings are to swim with." —E. E. Cummings (I: Six Non-Lectures.) "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author") Modern poetry "has been pretty much this: a series of attempts to come to terms with a world growing stranger by the day and year, and to make poetry relevant in that world—to master the meaning of it, and to rescue a language rendered empty and abstract, brutalized by hucksters and political men." (John Haines, qtd. by Valerie Trueblood, APR, Jan./Feb. 2003) "…that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at" (Addie Bundren in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) "Give me the best instruments in Let this be the poetry we seek, abraded as with acid by the hand's commitments, steeped in sweat and smoke, reeking of urine and lilies splattered by the motley trades within and without the law. Poetry impure like a coat, a body, stained with food and shameful notions, with wrinkles, remarks, dreams, vigilance, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, beasts, quakes, idylls, political creeds, denials, doubts, assertions, taxes. The sacred law of the madrigal and the decrees of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the lust for justice, sexual desire, the sound of the ocean, nothing deliberately excluded, nothing deliberately accepted, entrance into the depth of things in a headlong act of love… Whoever flees from bad taste will fall on the ice. Neruda, trans. John Felstiner, APR July/Aug. 2001, p. 4 "...poetry is a vocal, which is to say, a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing." (Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry 8) "Poems in a way are spells against death." (Richard Eberhart, qtd. by Associated Press, Yahoo News, 2005. "Make it new." (Ezra Pound)
(O. B. Hardison, Jr., Disappearing Through The SkyLight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century)
(Tennyson, "In Memorium") "Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle." (Baudelaire, "Windows," from
(Octavio Paz)
“The dream of art is not to assert what is already known, but to illuminate the hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by the will.” (Louise Gluck, qtd. by Elizabeth Dodd, The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet) "Art is a hammer to beat the world, not a mirror to reflect it." (Vladimir Majakovskij) “For a story to enrich [the reader’s] life it must stimulate his imagination, help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions, be attuned to his anxieties and his aspirations, give full recognition to his difficulties, suggest solutions to the problems that perturb him, and promote confidence in himself and his future.”
(Bruno Bettelheim)
"You know what I've decided? I don't want to be cremated. I used to, but now I think it sounds just a little too much like a blender speed. Now I've decided I want to be embalmed, and then I want a plastic surgeon to come put in silicone implants everywhere. Then I want to be laid out in the woods like Snow White, with a gravestone that reads Gotta Dance." The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist--it had to do the food work on its own. "There. We talked about death." Lorrie Moore, "Starving Again" ". . .with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes, or rather obliterates, every other consideration." (Keats) "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." (Auden) "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language." (Aldo Leopold) "I find it useless and boring to represent what exists, since nothing that exists can satisfy me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to trite reality. . .It is both by poetry and through poetry. . .that the soul dimly descries the splendors beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not the proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still one earth, of a revealed paradise. . .Thus the poetic principle is strictly and simply the human longing for a superior form of beauty. . ." (Baudelaire)
"Art is a train of thought wreck." (Brent Stone, from "Art-chives" online) " Art is a very small, off-duty Austrian traffic cop. Or a banana." (SO, from "Art-chives" online) "[Art is] three little letters that just can't hold it in any longer." (simone, from "Art-chives" online) "If you put a frame around it, you can call anything art." (Bill Pierce, from "Art-chives" online) "arT is that uncomfortable warm of sitting in a seat just abandoned." (dawn, from "Art-chives" online) "Have you ever seen Demmi Moore tits? This is the true meaning of art!" (Tiago Vaz, from "Art-chives" online) "One spits on the sublime. And still they come, demanding entrance, (Donald Justice, "Sonatina in Green")
(Dana Gioia) The new formalists and the language poets "share common strategies for witholding and specializing poetry. . .And if this is true, then [their] project. . .seems to be far less radical than it is nostalgic. It involves. . .not the recovery of traditional forms or the creation of new ones, but merely the classification or reclassification of poetry according to standard categories. . .[O]ne possible implication of this situation is that all the strife and bickering of the current literary wars masks a basic disinclination to alter American poetry. Beneath the rhetoric of innovation lies an investment in the status quo. In this reading the project of the language poets and new formalists is not to renovate the ghetto of free verse but to free it for the subdivisions of technique." (Lynn Emanual, "Language Poets, New Formalists and the Techniquization of Poetry") "We must realize, I think, that the writer in freer forms must have an even greater fidelity to his subject matter than the poet who has the support of form. He must keep his eye on the subject, and his rhythm must move as the wind moves, must be imaginatively right, or he is lost." (Theodore Roethke) "Though logic-choppers rule the town, --from "Tom O'Roughley," William "Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure." (A.E. Houseman) "Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views and the comparison of standpoint." (Henry James, Theile Teaching Philosophy) "The day I remember with greatest clarity of my four years as a Yale undergraduate was the one on which Stephen Spender and then Robert Frost appeared and I saw that poetry wasn't just a literary genre but, literally, a blood sport." (David R. Slavitt, "Poetric Justice," Boulevard, Spring 2003.) "Human languages themselves are the greatest of all works of art beside which the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare are minor variations." (Eric McLuhan, Electric Language) "The joke says: Under capitalism, man exploits man, but under communism, it's the other way around." (Kellie Cherrie, The Exiled Heart)
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself) "It has always been one of the most essential functions of art to engender a demand for which the hour of full satisfaction is yet to come." Walter Benjamin, qtd. by Richard Shiff, Common Language, Fall 2003
Anonymous, United Kingdom, circa 1000 "I paint pictures of myself to. . .I guess, yeah, to remind myself that I am still around." (Andy Warhol)
(Matthew Arnold) "Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you. (Winnie-the-Pooh)
(Samual Johnson, The Rambler)
There is some bad writing in it. "Big fucking deal. Do they realize that most books are mostly bad writing?" (Philip Levine, interviewed by
(Marvin Bell) "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." (T.S. Eliot) "American poetry prides itself on its great scope and diversity, but one wonders if an outsider might not come away with a very different notion. Imagine what an intelligent eighteenth-century reader would conclude if he surveyed the several hundred books of poetry published in America this past year. . .His overall reaction, I suspect, would be a deep disappointment over the predictable sameness, the conspicuous lack of diversity in what he read. Where are the narrative poems, he would ask, the verse romances, ballads, hymns, verse dramas, didactic tracts, burlesques, satires, the songs actually meant to be sung, and even the pastoral eclogues? Are stories no long told in poetry? Important ideas no longer discussed at length? The panoply of available genres would seem reduced to a few hardy perennials which poets worked over and over again with dreary regularity--the short lyric, the ode, the familiar verse epistle, perhaps the epigram, and one new-fangled form called the 'sequence' which often seemed to be either just a group of short lyrics stuck together or an ode in the process of falling apart. . .These new poets, he might conclude, are a very monotonous bunch indeed. . ." (Dana Gioia, "The Dilemma of the Long Poem")
(Donald Justice)
(Valery, Aesthetics.)
(Anne Carson, "Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking") "It seemed very sad to see you going off in your new shoes alone." (Zelda Fitzerald, in a letter F.Scott) "Slam dancing was a deadend. Break dancing, coming a living ground, goes out through media but becomes ultimately transformed into another living ground--the kids in the elementary school down the street in Santa Monica break dance. Which is to say, a grace has been added to their lives. A possibility of grace. With the vitality that comes from having originated from a living ground. The media here is taking its proper role as a channel, not as a world in itself. It's possible that these kids are being affected more in their bodies and their daily lives by the (Michael
(Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being)
"Art is thinking in images."—Aleksander Potebnya "The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing. . ." (Roland Barthes, Image--Music--Text)
(Marvin Bell)
"It's the centipede syndrome, you know? The centipede was asked which foot he puts after which, and he couldn't walk anymore." (Roman Polanski, "What I've Learned," Esquire, Dec. 99) I believe in you my soul. . . .the other I am must not abase itself to you, Loaf with me on the grass. . . .loose the stop from your throat, (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)
(Louise Gluck)
"Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces." (Mallarme) "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed." (Narrator of Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"
(Augustine, Confessions) "Fragments are the only forms I trust." (Narrator of Donald Barthelme's "See the Moon?")
And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's
(Norman Mailer) "No one would bother to write verse if the poet's goal were to make himself understood." (Montale)
(Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens)
(Northrop Frye) "Rim ember us poke in cent tense all mow stall ways con deigns word snot in ten did" (Robert Beard) "Pretty high once, he told me in Then he apologized, (James L.White, "Poems of Submission")
(Thomas Love Peacock) ". . .to the poets therefore. . .we must issue orders requiring them to represent good character in their poems or not to write at all; we must issue similar orders to all artists and prevent them portraying bad character, ill-discipline, meanness, or ugliness in. . .any work of art, and if they are unable to comply they must be forbidden to practice their art." (Plato) "The origin and source of poetry is the wisdom to write according to moral principles." (Horace) "It has been assumed. . .that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be ajudged. . . But the simple fact is, that. . .there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified --more supremely noble than. . .a poem written solely for the poem's sake. . .He must be theory-made beyond redemption who. . .still persists in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth." (Poe) "A whole crowd of people imagine that the aim of poetry is some sort of lesson, that its duty is to fortify conscience, or to perfect social behavior, or even, finally, to demonstrate something or other that is useful. . .but poetry has no other aim but itself; it can have no other; and no poem will be as great, as noble, so truly worthy of the name 'poem' as the one written for no purpose other than the pleasure of writing a poem. . .[I]f the poet has pursued a moral aim, he will have diminished his poetic power; nor will it be incautious to bet that his work is bad." (Baudelaire)
(Oscar Wilde) "What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet." (Keats) "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if yu feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (Narrator of Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story")
(W.S. Merwin, "Air") "Now...it is a question of experimentation (which, if its aim is to promote gregarious insecurity, requires the security of the experimenter's mind -- namely, that he be sheltered and isolated, so that he can surrender himself, without witnesses, to the various phases of failure that his success requires)." (Pierre Klossowski / Nietzsche and the Vicious)
Before class on Monday the teacher, who smelled of Emeraude and faintly of onions and who felt herself perhaps the sort of woman doomed in middle age to be always taking other people's children for walks in parks, read a giant stack of student poems. The ones by a black student named Darrel Erni were the most interesting, mostly about women he's known in (Lorrie Moore, Anagrams) The mind of the contemporary lyric poet does not view word and world as either-or categories; it’s a mind which rests easily with, on the one hand, any creative writing workshop’s love of close, even formalist reading and, on the other hand, a firm awareness that the boundaries of the literary text are really not closed; that all texts function in a discursive field from which there is no escape. It’s a mind, in fact, which lives precisely in that always agitated, contested boundary between form and content, word and world, “constructed experience” and “lived experience” (Drucker 34). In any given act of artistic perception, language and world variously flow into each other, bump, smudge, change places, have stare-downs. They denigrate, deny, and seduce each other; obliterate and otherwise become each other. It’s possible this is true of any perception or any writing, but in poetry, I would argue, it’s much more to the fore, much more entangled in each work’s very content. And I would also say that this point of struggle, this uncertain boundary of such interest to poets, might also be regarded as “the body.” The body is the ultimate interface, simultaneously open and closed. It contains, defines and limits us, yet at the same time brings us into contact with everything outside of us and not us. It is our greatest source of both isolation and ecstatic connection, and it is where poetry lives. So I'll say it again. Some acts and artifacts are more self-referential than others. Engaging with words as words, grokking and being grokked by language, means immersion in some of the most complex, maddening, fabulous and heart-breaking questions we can possibly ask. It means a heightened perception of the possibilities of language even as we are feeling its limits, its displacing action, the inevitable, shifty space between what points and what is pointed at. Writing along the very nerve-line of language-making and language-feeling means to be alive in the moment to the ongoing drama of creating ourselves as symbol-making beings, with both the wonder and the despair such being entails. And this live instance of creation—the twists and turns of intuition, reasoning, desire, and memory—dramatically informs the final work. Creation doesn’t occur and then get poured into a structure, but neither is it just a wild hurling onto the page. Form and content duke it out, screw, converse, diddle each other, ignore each other, become each other… (some unknown deviant)
(Anne Carson, "Town On the Way through God's Woods)
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