As the result of this universal whiteness

Snow is a form of light.

-Yves Bonnefoy

Image: Cuno Amiet
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Out of sheer wonderment

“Our hands full or not:
 

The same abundance.
 

Our eyes open or shut:
 

The same light.” 
 

-Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Poems


Image: Kim Høltermand, Grundtvigs Church, 2009
Title: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

The sky runs toward me, laughing like a child

I really don't know clouds at all.
 

-Joni Mitchell

 

Image: Found
 

Title: Yves Bonnefoy, from “The Painter Named Snow”

A higher or less somber shore

    We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

-Tom Stoppard

Image: Uta Barth

Title: Yves Bonnefoy, The House Where I Was Born (trans. by John T. Naughton)

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