Being or nothing, that is the question

      We are never real historians, but always near poets... 

   -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image: Federico Hurtado, Portraits Without Masks
Title: Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro

The sound keeps coming out of the flowers

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
-Pablo Neruda

Image: Spike Mafford, the black dots spell out the title, The Meadow
Title: Basso

Every Extravagance at Once

 

    "To create something like a poem, means that the outside world of an artist and the internal drives within her blend and blur."

     -Dorothea Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project

Image: found
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake

    On foot
I wandered through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already I have a sense of myself.
Somewhere in space my heart hangs,
emitting sparks, shaking the air,
to other immeasurable hearts.

     -Edith Irene Södergran, “On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems” 

Image: Annie Vought, i took the girl to walk in circles, (paper cut letters)
Title: Wallace Stevens

An expression of poetry that was lost

the invisible thing inside
circling
     glass
     on its voyage out
     to the heart

-Michael Ondaatje, “*(Insomnia)” from the collection The Cinnamon Peeler

Image: Louise Bourgeois, The Insomnia Drawings, 2000
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Liquefaction

    I blame the twilight for coming too soon,
not allowing enough time for you
to drown without dying. And now
the water boatmen skate on the skin
of water, we should have practiced
how to breathe. Instead we undressed
each other slowly: middle names, first
loves, spiders, toads and newts. Taking our
time to visit every corner, all the while
knowing we would soon run out of self.
I want to ignore the silver scar
on your left retina: the imprint of an iceberg.
Those places you were yearning for: Bermuda,
Pacific, Icelandic waters. Confident diver
that you are, land was never your best side.
What remains is the space around
your hands, their quietness, and at the tips
of fingers the fain hum of blue.

-Saradha Soobrayen, “On the water meadows

Image 1: Max Ernst, Air washed in water (L’air lavé à l’eau), 1973

Image 2: Map: The Grand Circle

A sharp-edged throne, a great arsenic lobster

Language is not transparent.

Image: Mel Bochner
Title: García Lorca, from Theory and Play of the Duende (obviously)

A swarm of voluptuous moths

    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.

-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

There is a language older by far and deeper than words

"The very function of poetry is to be as universal as possible, and that demands that we rectify, simplify, enlarge our lived experience, so that our words have properties that make them on the whole comprehensible and lived anew—the reader must understand that what is obscure in the poem proves that words should not be reduced to a game of concepts, which in turn would engender ideology, death. It is not a question of understanding a poem concept by concept, for that would mean tearing it away from its basis, which is not thought but experience.”

—Yves Bonnefoy

Image: James Glaisher, Travels in the Air, 1871
Title: Derrick Jensen

The poem is not a vehicle, it is an act of transportation

“Tourists don’t know where they have been. Travelers don’t know where they are going.”
-Paul Theroux

Image: Otto Steinert
Title: Eliot Weinberger, “The River”

And So We Live And Are Forever Leaving

 Child, I tell you now it was not
the animal blood I was hiding from,
it was the poet in her, the poet and
the terrible stories she could tell.

-Lucille Clifton from “Telling Our Stories“

Image: Oleksandr Hnatenko
Title: Rilke

An inevitable locomotive

We must admit there will be music despite everything.*

-Jack Gilbert, "A Brief for the Defense"

*"Poetry, for me," he declares in a 1965 essay, "is a witnessing to magnitude." In poems he sings of a "magnitude of pain, of being that much alive," and "a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace." +

Yes. And yes.

[R.I.P., Jack. 11.11.12]

Image: Etienne Martin, Le Manteau, 1962

Between the Cry and Silence

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G. K. Chesterton

Image: Salvador Dalí, The portrait of Federico García Lorca 
Title: From Octavio Paz, “André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning. Alternating Current” 

Today I feel the whole world is a door

What is art? Trying to find the door.

-Adam Fuss

Image: Hannah Höch, Portait of Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919
Title: Nod to Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theatre”

The astonished places you inhabited and left

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.

-Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures”


Image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980 +
Title: Rilke (who else?), from Uncollected Poems

The Flair of Great Loneliness There

+

The primordial tower

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 2



Image: Andrey Zakirzyanov,  The battle of celestial bodies, 1994

The Purpose of Poetry

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

-Czesław Miłosz

The ecstatic love of a young writer

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

—Charles Bukowski

Image: Dirk Nijland, Angler on the river Maas, Rotterdam

Title: Nod to Vladimir Nabokov

Symphonies without movements, operas without words

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind.

-George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

Image: The Musarithmetic Ark, attributed to Athanasius Kircher, 1650

Title thanks to: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century