Intersections #1-66: A Self-Guided Workshop
~ INTERSECTIONS ~
#1
Newness Ends
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but
because they are not already common. -John Locke
“New arts destroy the old.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson (Circles)
“I listen to the old to get ideas for the new” - Abigale Washburn
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#2
Be Courageous
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
-Mark Twain
“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.”
-Eric Hoffer
“There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome—to be got over.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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#3
Find your own path
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
-Jack London
(Not everyone’s method is right for you. Jack London is a bit of a bro, eh?)
Patience is also a form of action. -Auguste Rodin
“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
-Abigail Adams
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#4
“Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not easy.”
-Aristotle
If there’s no ideal, there’s no fear.”
-Leo Babauta (ZenHabits)
“So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.”
-James Richardson
[from] VECTORS: 56 APHORISMS AND TEN-SECOND ESSAYS
“Two thoughts cannot coexist at once: if the clear light of mindfulness is present, there is no room for mental twilight.”
-Nyanaponika Thera
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#5
Seize The Moment, Gently
“The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life. […] To stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I think that’s why I needed to practice Zen, rather than go to graduate school. You cannot write until you know how to inhabit your own experience.”
-Jane Hirshfield
“I suppose I’m affected by Emerson’s “ever-present now,” by the Buddhist practice of being fully present to the moment—living moment to moment—and by the Christian idea of the incarnation, the sensual world that blesses our being daily.”
-Todd Davis (How a Poem Happens)
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#6
More Reasons to Write
“Writing poems moves us past where we were when we sat down to write them.”
-Sharon Olds
“Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.”
-Robert Coover
“Writing is this great invention because it extends human memory.”
-Angela Duckworth
(No Stupid Questions podcast, episode “Why Is It So Hard to Be Alone With Our Thoughts?”)
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#7
You Do You
"Resist any temptation to use the poem to make its readers like you, or admire you, or forgive you." - Ellen Bryant Voigt
What do you do? What do you love? What are your hopes?
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#8
Free Your Body, Free Your Mind
“To move freely you must be deeply rooted.”
-Bella Lewitzky (dancer)
“Dig deeper. Go deeper.”
-Jack Gilbert
“An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.”
-Henri Matisse
When asked to describe his style, John Coltrane said, "I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once."
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#9
Shrapnel
"Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact."
-Judith Butler
Put another way—
“People say friends don’t destroy one another / What do they know about friends?”
-The Mountain Goats (Game Shows Touch Our Lives / Tallahassee)
+
I've always found the word internecine thought-provoking. It gets defined a number of ways; one version is "mutual destruction on both sides."
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#10
Jump The Other Shark
“In enjambment, or a run-over line, the syntax throws its leg over the hedge or low wall of the line.”
-Robert Pinsky (The Sounds of Poetry)
“…rhythm is the sound of an actual line, while meter is the abstract pattern behind the rhythm […] rhythm is the reality”
-Robert Pinsky
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#11
Just Keep Swimming / aka. Keep Moving / aka. Can’t stop, Won’t stop
“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
“Keep Moving…” -Maggie Smith
“An object in motion tends to remain in motion…”
-Isaac Newton
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
-Heraclitus
“The river is running, we’re flowing”
-Khalid (Motion)
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#12
Watching others watch you watch others
“I think I thought I saw you try”
-R.E.M (Losing My Religion)
“You're so / Occupied with what other persons are / Occupied with”
-Built to Spill (Carry the Zero)
"So we live a life like a video"
-Jay Z (Young Forever)
“Trying to look like you don't try”
-R.E.M. (Imitation of Life)
“I'd rather be no one than someone with no one”
-The Stone Roses (Here it Comes)
“Then you say, go slow / I fall behind”
-Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time)
“Well I lagged behind / So you got ahead”
-Bright Eyes (Gold Mine Gutted)
“All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day / put the pieces back together my way”
-Aesop Rock (Daylight)
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#13
Systems of Belief
Do you believe this?
“Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” -Gustave Flaubert
What about this?
“Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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#14
The Relationship between Language & Things
“No ideas but in things.” – William Carlos Williams
“Words are not things.” – Al Filreis
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#15
Voice Lessons
“Your voice dries up if you don't use it.”
-Patti Page
Practice. Journal. Reflect. Put words down. Don’t stress about quality. Don’t stress about quantity. Three good words in a row is better than a page of nonsense.
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#16
Recent Darknesses: Candle, Mirror, Reflection
“I too go from the night.”
-Walt Whitman
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-Edith Wharton
“Through me runs the power of recent dark experience.”
-George Saunders (Home, Tenth of December)
Tell how darkness spreads?
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#17
On Time
“Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.”
-Robert Bly
Write a poem about time using Bly’s thoughts as an epigraph or jumping off point.
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#18
On Personal Responsibility
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”
-Molière
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”
-J.S. Mill
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#19
On the Spectrum of Interesting
This feels factual, doesn’t it?
è “To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.”
-Auguste Rodin
Think about how a dog smells nothing good or bad only interesting.
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#20
Ancestry
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are often referred to as the grandparents of America poetry. While they’re by no means alone in forming the voice of American poetics, their impact, like the impact of invaluable America poets of the 1900s, ripple through the language of contemporary poets.
“The dead are in control”
-Amiri Baraka
“Poets are dead people talking about being alive”
-Mary Ruefle [from] 28 Short Lectures at Harvard
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#21
On Productivity
Marketing guru’s talk about being busy vs. being productive …
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
-Socrates
“If you seek tranquility, do less. Or (more accurately) do what’s essential. Do less, better. Because most of what we do or say is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more tranquility.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
-Voltaire
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#22
STAY CURIOUS, STAY HUMBLE
“Through others, we become ourselves.”
-Lev Vygotsky
“Don’t identify too strongly with your work.”
-Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones)
“Use only that which works and take it from any place you can find it.”
-Bruce Lee
“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”
-Paul Celan
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."”
-H.L. Mencken
Cameron Conaway once told me, “Writers do not suffer from writer’s block, they suffer from curiosity block.”
The artist’s path benefits from, if not requires, lifelong curiosity.
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#23
Listen In
"A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but because he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with."
- Kenneth A. Wells
"Poetry comes from listening; what you're listening for is what you don't know."
-W.S. Merwin
(from Lannan Foundation interview: W. S. Merwin with Naomi Shihab Nye, 18 October 2000)
I am going to stand beside the man who works all day combing
his thatch of gray hair corkscrewed in every direction.
I am going to pay attention to our lives
unraveling between the forks of his fine-tooth comb.
-Major Jackson (How to Listen)
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#24
What moves you?
‘You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”
-Marie Curie
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#25
On Suspense
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
-Alfred Hitchcock
How do we integrate suspense in our poems?
A good poem only does so much hand-holding. A bit like stand-up comedy, we create a sort of tension and then a release of tension.
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#26
What is a Poet, What is a Painter
Frank O’Hara tells us why he is not a painter.
https://poets.org/poem/why-i-am-not-painter
What is a painter?
“A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.”
-Pablo Picasso
I feel this statement can be updated…
What is a poet to you?
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#27
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#28
No Solace
“Anything that consoles is fake.”
-Iris Murdoch
How tragic is this statement??
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#29
To Suffer or Not to Experience
“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”
-Iris Murdoch
Is a human life truly centered around suffering?
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#30
Self-loathing, Redemption
“How embarrassing to be human.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
-Elizabeth Leo
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#31
Defective
“We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville
What so-called “defects” make you exceptional?
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#32
Bad Things Come in Threes
Write a plea for the 3rd bad thing not to happen. What if the other shoe doesn't have to drop?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bad_things_come_in_threes
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#33
The Bane of Truth-Telling
“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth – whatever the truth may be – that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
-June Jordan
“Truth” like “Facts” have become problematized during the Trump years. For someone like Trump, not telling the truth appears to actually come easier than telling the truth. What do we make of this?
I wrote these initial thoughts [above] during the Trump Administration.
Consider, now, with a brief distance from Trump in office, if you feel different about the future of truth, facts, truthiness.
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#34
Passion
What are your passions? (I know, this question has become super irritating for many)
“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
-Hegel
Pause to reflect on passion. What does “being passionate” mean to you. Are you a person who associates passion more with diligence? Your work? Or, maybe the sort who associate passion with being madly in love. What about lust?
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#35
Dive Deep
“If poems are deep-sea diving, writing fiction is foraging."
-Tess Gallagher
Write about where you gather your insights.
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#36
How to Dig for Fire
“My kind of poetry is this constant dredging up of things out of the psyche.”
-David Bottoms (Interview – “Fishing From The Poetry Boat”)
“The Greek fishermen do not / play on the beach and I don’t / write funny poems.”
-Jack Gilbert (Metier)
“There’s something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anyone can pretend to be serious. But you can’t pretend to be funny.”
-Billy Collins
“Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It’s a way of enticing the reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.”
-Billy Collins
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#37
Entertaining Ideas
Reflect, take in what feels significant to you, move forward
“It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.”
-Randall Jarrell
Teach yourself to see differently. Don’t see what everyone else is seeing. What would you guess they’re not paying attention to?
I love photographs with telephone wires across a landscape. I loved it before it was cool. Or when it was just starting to be cool, and I just didn’t know it was already a thing. Or maybe, as is often the case, lots of people had similar ideas around the time same.
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#38
On Metaphor
“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances [pause] or treading water in a sea of seeming.” -Roberto Bolaño
“If there is any originality in the writing of a poem, it comes from the act of making metaphors.” -David Bottoms (The Onion’s Dark Core)
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#39
Your Writing Routine
“People who say they sit down at their typewriters every morning at nine to write poems are suspicious to me. Most poems just don’t come that way.”
-David Bottoms (The Onion’s Dark Core)
“Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work.”
-Richard Hugo (The Triggering Town)
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#40
Arc
Life is not linear. We’ll never understand everything about our reality. There are some aspects of life that are simply beyond our capacity to comprehend.
“Life is one long, fragmented, murky episode”
-Tu Fu [from] Thwarted (Carolyn Kizer trans.)
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#41
Conflict Resolution
“Dialogue is the most effective way of resolving conflict.”
-Tenzin Gyatso (The 14thDalai Lama)
“The quality of our lives depends not on whether or not we have conflicts, but on how we respond to them.”
-Thomas Crum
“Conflict cannot survive without your participation.”
-Wayne Dyer
“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional.”
-Max Lucado
“If I ever have a conflict between art and nature, I let art win.”
-Robert Bateman
“Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.”
-Donatella Versace
“Without conflict there is no plot, witout hope there is no story.”
-Cassandra Clare
“Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.”
-Karen Horney
“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.”
-Robert McKee
“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
-William James
Robert Frost wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” We come to the page with something we need to work through. We have to work through it in real time for the reader to comprehend our intention. We have to dance our way through the poem with just the right amount of hand-holding. You don’t want the reader to lose interest or fall away from the path. You move in many directions at once towards what eventually feels like an inevitable ending. In a workshop, I once asked if an ending had “been earned.” This was pointed out by workshop leader, William Logan, as a very MFA question. Logan’s response? “Just be happy the poem got there.”
William Butler Yeats says, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” We come to the page with a conflict. We leave the page with at least a temporary solution.
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#42
When is a poem finished?
“It achieved its final form when I stopped making it worse.” -Philip Levine [on] “The Two”
http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2009/04/philip-levine.html
“I write a lot; most of what I write is discarded. I like the process of invention. After I have about six months of first drafts, I go back and read to see which ones are still exciting for me on the page. Only a tiny percentage of poems make it into a final manuscript. I don't know how I decide they are finished. Maybe I just know I am not smart enough to make them any better at that moment?” -Faith Shearin
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/bookshelf/shearin.shtml
“Perfect things in poetry do not seem strange, they seem inevitable.”
-Jorge Luis Borges (from Harvard lecture series)
“You can’t find better words for the best words.”
-Glyn Maxwell (On Poetry)
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#43
The Writer’s Hat, The Editor’s Hat
Don’t revise yourself out of writing a sensational poem.
“Finish the poem first, then worry, if you have to, about being right or sane.”
-Richard Hugo (The Triggering Town)
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#44
The Price of Milk
“I felt and still feel that a writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the realities of life.”
-Vicki Baum
Don’t forget what it means to put in hours. It means something different if those hours are in front of a screen or vaguely in a form of Heidegger’s dasein – being there / being-in-the-world with others.
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#45
Stay Gold, Ponyboy
“All that glitters is not gold.”
-Shakespeare
“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”
-Colette
Don’t actually destroy your work. Try to separate what may shimmer for you alone and what truly conveys your intentions to your audience.
#46
On Poverty, Class, Justice, Goodness, Selfishness
“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
-Bryan Stevenson
“Good [is] the opposite of selfish”
-Simon Anholt
“I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.”
-E.B. White
“A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder.”
-English proverb
“Dire economic need is a form of coercion”
-The West Wing (tv show)
“...the day-to-day insulation from material poverty that accompanies affluent living”
-Duane Elgin (Voluntary Simplicity, degrowth movement)
“Give me neither poverty nor wealth.”
-Proverbs 30:8
“The coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the man who needs it.”
-Basil the Great
“Reality beats prejudice.”
-Barney Frank
#47
They Don’t Love You Like I Love You: Notes on a Cento using Song Lyrics
I’ll never be picture perfect Beyoncé
-Everything I Am (Kanye West)
Slow down, they don’t love you like I love you
- Hold Up (Beyoncé)
Playin' it right, playin' it perfect
Laughin' it off, but I know you're hurtin'
-Signs (Drake)
Wait, can you turn around, can you turn around?
-Wait (Maroon 5)
I need to say, hey, it’s all me, just don't go
Meet me in the afterglow
-Afterglow (Taylor Swift)
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you
-Maps (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
#48
Being alone with your thoughts
“For most of us, thinking is like being kidnapped by the most boring person on earth and being told the same story over and over again.”
-Sam Harris
#49
Like Stephen King with his novels, The Poet writes the same poet again & again in pursuit of perfection
“Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be.”
-Richard Hugo (The Triggering Town)
#50
AI Fear
AI will have all the knowledge. Wikipedia. Google. The Internet.
It doesn’t matter.
The difference is we’ve always self-selected. Cherry picked our wisdom. What we care about and what we pass over. We choose.
In the end, our choices are, of course, what defines us. We focus on what entices us. We dig deeper. Because we are flawed. Because we are human.
To err is poet. Poets are flawed. Poems are flawed. We are products of our interests and of our time.
We are limited and therefore we are unique. Our words are meaningful because we must work hard. AI is no match because AI cannot move through the world as we do.
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#51
On the Truthiness of Facts & the Stamina of Deception
“Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
-Flannery O'Connor
“Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.”
-Albert Schweitzer (Nobel Lecture: The Problem of Peace)
“Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.”
-Harriet Lerner
“Religion is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics”
-The Dalai Lama
“There are no absolute truths; I believe in specifics.”
-Amy Tan
“William James…defined truth as what “works.”
-James Longenbach (The Virtues of Poetry)
#52
In Pursuit of Peace / What’s at Stake
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.”
-MLK Jr.
A poem without anything at stake is hardly a poem at all. Some, especially those who have been in workshops or programs, may well be familiar with talk of high vs. low stakes in poems. We are told not to write so-called “low stakes” poems. What gets confused easily enough is the false comparison of simple (as in minimalist) with attention to minutiae. You can write a fine poem about the veins in a maple leaf. And maybe that poem is not low stakes after all. It depends what else is going on in the poem. If the poem is simply a description of a leaf or a narrative poem about a walk in which the speaker encounters a leaf and then goes on their way—well, that may indeed be low stakes. But suppose the leaf in instead a symbol for something much more serious. Suppose the veins of the leaf make the speaker think about their loved one in the hospital attached to an IV drip. Now the leaf poem isn’t so small after all.
Think of Kay Ryan and Rae Armantrout poems. Think of “Poet’s Work” by Lorine Niedecker.
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#53
Stay Humble
“No matter how smart you are, you spend most of your day being an idiot.”
-Scott Adams
“Yeats arranged his poems carefully so that we might hear them doubting themselves, doubting one another, and of one thing about Yeats one may be sure: if he states a position strongly in a particular poem, he will somewhere else contradict it.”
-James Longenbach (The Virtues of Poetry)
“The energies of poetry’s concentrations do not exist in isolating one from another…”
-Jane Hirshfield (Nine Gates)
“Art-making begins when the mind enters a condition different from everyday, discursive thinking—the condition Mozart called being completely himself and I have called concentration. In this state, what arises feels less made than gift, and Mozart’s indifference to originality is widely echoed. Even the most revolutionary writers deny any conscious effort toward uniqueness.”
-Jane Hirshfield (Nine Gates) (Hirshfield goes on to quote Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens)
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#54
Materialism
“Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more”
-Sonic Youth (“The Sprawl” (Daydream Nation 1988))
“Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.”
-John Ruskin
“Vampires are the perfect match for the crisis in capitalist consumerism, their excess of appetite a ghastly parody of the economic machine, while zombies, anonymous beings evacuated of self and volition, perfectly embody the figure of the economic serf, captive to workless degradation.”
-Marina Warner (from review of “Monsters, magic, and miracles”)
“Love people, use things. The opposite never works.”
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#55
Experiment #42
Write a poem in which you address God.
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#56
Moving Forward vs. Moving On
“This too shall pass”
vs.
"Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks.”
(tout passe, tout lasse, tout case)
- French Proverb
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#58
On Experimentation
“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”
-William Carlos Williams
Kim Addonizio recommends experimenting with writing your poems in a blank unlined notebook. Try to collect a whole book this way. Then review after. See what works.
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#59
Freedom
"A hungry man is not a free man"
-Adlai Stevenson
“This is wrong. It is unworthy of decent people. And so, it cannot stand.”
-Leonard Pitts, Jr. on the killing of Trayvon Martin and discussing how “the first casualty of racism is individuality, the right to be your singular self.”
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#60
Men
"You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable."
-Marguerite Duras
The true test of a civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops -- no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”
-Sidney J. Harris
“...when a man is hurt he becomes an expert”
-Tony Hoagland
“The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
-Francisco Goya
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#61
Naming The World, Ordering The World
“What reprieve is there from drowning, other than in names.”
-Amy Clampitt
"I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry."
-Richard Wilbur
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#62
Meaning Making
“Chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort”
-Psychologist Kelly McGonigal
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#63
On Memory
“Memory is like surveillance footage: Everything gets picked up but you don't really review it unless there's an incident.”
-Tony Dokoupil
“People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.”
-Haruki Murakami
“Messing up the order of delimiters in a way that doesn’t reflect the logical nesting of their content is just an affront to an orderly mind.”
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#64
Kicking The Victim who is already Down
“If we are at war / our lives should feel like cut-outs”
-Katie Ford
"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned."
-Ibn Sina (Persian philosopher)
“When we feel like victims all our actions are legitimized.”
-Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel’s Game)
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#65
The Role of the Writer, Expectations of Readers / Audience
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
-Marcel Proust
“When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.”
-Clifton Fadiman
“For no writer can help assuming that the reader is already like him. Already having seen, ad nauseum, what life looks like, he's far more interested in how it feels as a signpost toward what it means.”
-David Foster Wallace (“The Legend of The Cadaver that Got a B”)
“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”
-G.K. Chesterton
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#66
A Few Good Poems
“Good poems hold more than one knowledge […] a good part of their power lies in embraced tension, the way they pull in more than a single direction.”
-Jane Hirshfield (Nine Gates)
“Literature can achieve a curious emotional bargain with death.”
“…poetry, for me, has always involved an element of the other-worldly.”
“To phrase this in a somewhat more mystical way, poetry is the literary genre that points most willingly to the veiled significance behind the physical world.”
-David Bottoms (The Onion’s Dark Core)