Much Unseen is Also Here

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: Amy Judd
Title: Walt Whitman

The things I discovered while I was looking for something else

"If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry." 

-Stephen Spender

Image: Mark Hartman
Title: Shelby Foote

Unfathomable Cities

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

-Rilke

Image: Irene Suchocki

Mute as amber

When we speak of solitaries, we always take too much for granted. We think people know what we are talking about. But they know absolutely nothing. 

-Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Art: Vilhelm Hammershoi, Baker's Shop, 1888 
Title: James Agee, excerpt from A Death in the Family

Something Godlike: Both Tree and Center

 











I was left behind with the immensity of existing things…a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czesław Miłosz

Image: Peter Keetman, Projektion, 1953
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

Hymns you haven’t heard

“What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is 

 

treacherous and irresistible...” 
 

-László Krasznahorkai, War and War


Image: Adelaide Hanscom, Plate XV, 1905
Title: Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 40

Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn

I have taken action against fear. I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Image: Robert Clinch, No Standing,  1998

Title: Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes 

Both eager and afraid to fall in

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, L’Agneau Mystique (The Ghent Altarpiece), 1432
Title: Rainer Maria Rilke, from Early Journals

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

When I lean over the chasm of myself

    We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

    -Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image: Found here
Title: Rilke, from The Book of Hours I, 3

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

New Year's Resolution 2013

Image: Laurence Demaison
Quote: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

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

Like a flag, I am surrounded by distances

The map is more interesting than the territory.

-Attributed, in a roundabout way, to Michel Houellebecq



Image: A chart of the Canarie and Madera Islands, ca. 1702-1707, NYPL Digitial Gallery
Title: Rilke, from Book of Images

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, from Uncollected Poems

Hesitantly, like scattered islands

"We go forward and backward, and there is no place."
-Rosmarie Waldrop, "Conversation 4: On Place,” from Reluctant Gravities +

Image: Danny Lyon, The Walls: Cell Block Table, 1964
Title: Nod to Rilke (who else?), from The Book of Hours I, 18

The repository of unlived things

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Pilgrimage in Rilke’s Book of Hours

Image: Found

Everything is

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, p. 23 [translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

Photo: Inge Morath, Courtyard and portal, Masjid-e Shah, Isfahan, Iran, 1956

Our True Face Never Speaks

 

 

[Title by Rilke]

Art: Augustus Vincent Tack, Evening, between 1934 and 1936