Intersections #53: Stay Humble

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)