12/29/08

Brown is unusual in contemporary poetry for her willingness to be thought ill of. In fact, it's significant that ugly-truth-tellers are much more common in our fiction than our poetry. Much of our mainstream poetry is confined by an ethic of sincerity and the unstated wish to be admired (if not admired, liked; if not liked, sympathized with). American poetry still largely believes, as romantics have for a few hundred years, that a poem is straightforward autobiographical testimony to, among other things, the decency of the speaker. And, for all the freedom and "opening up" engendered by Confessionalism, to be uninhibitedly mean, we all know, is itself prohibited. Welcome to Poetry City: Hurt someone's feelings: Go to jail.

-Tony Hoagland, 'Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People'
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.

-Czeslaw Milosz, "Blacksmith Shop"
We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep, and now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.

-Robert Louis Stevenson
[via 3quarks and ayjay]
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'

-Aldous Huxley

-Thomas Hart Benton, Henry Look Unhitching (1942)

To make an image breathe as does the rest of Nature it must have a basic rhythm.

-Arthur Dove

12/20/08

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

-Steve Martin
Bad poetry always suffers from the same defects: synthetic hallucination and artifice. Invention is not poetry.... Poetry is vision, the pure act of sensual communion and contemplation.

-Kenneth Rexroth [via]

12/14/08

20
I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,
but I don't know whose flute it is.

A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.

A lily pad blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!

When one flower opens, ordinarily dozens open.

The moon bird's head is filled with nothing but
thoughts of the moon,
and when the next rain will come is all that the rain bird thinks of.

Who is it we spend our entire life loving?


-Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

12/11/08

Dark cypresses -
The world is uneasily happy:
It will all be forgotten.

-Theodor Storm

12/8/08

the poet speaks of art

Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.

-Edward Hirsch

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.

-Horace Walpole [via]

12/1/08

Ideal Audience

Not scattered legions,
not a dozen from
a single region
for whom accent
matters, not a seven-
member coven,
not five shirttail
cousins; just
one free citizen -
maybe not alive
now even - who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room.

-Kay Ryan