These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T.S. Eliot

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.  -T.S. Eliot
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Friday, July 29, 2016

I felt myself vanishing into blue




       "In water, like in books—you can leave your life."                   
       -Lidia Yuknavitch

Title: Steven Millhauser
Image: Paul Klee, Hilterfingen, 1895

Sunday, November 17, 2013

To cross the border beyond


















Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet

-Mary Ruefle, from "White Buttons" as found in Trances of the Blast
Title: Octavio Paz, The Double Flame
Image: Trinity Site explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

In what distant deeps




















    I wanted to live among books.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Image: Kerry Mansfield
Title: William Blake, from “The Tyger”

Thursday, May 16, 2013

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

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

They would rather be trees














There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Image: Érik Desmazières for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges2000
Title: Margaret Atwood, Men With the Heads of Eagles

Saturday, February 16, 2013

This forest of letters
























   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

Friday, January 18, 2013

In the vast world or in the immense past
































… the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.
— R. S. Thomas, excerpt from “The Untamed” 


Images: Found; Edward Curtis
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space



Saturday, January 12, 2013

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 ArnoldCrystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen




Friday, December 7, 2012

There is no Frigate like a Book























“You live several lives while reading.” 
 
-William Styron


Image: Thomas Dibdin, Bibliomania, or, Book-madness : a bibliographical romance, 1842
Title: Em Dickinson

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Trying to Find the Door























    A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page… And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about.
-Gerald Murnane, Inland
Image: Chad Wys, from the series The Critique of Gesture
Title: Nod to Adam Fuss

Monday, October 29, 2012

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”

Saturday, August 4, 2012

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

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin










"And though recently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time."

-Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Image: Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, history from 4000 BC - 1813 AD

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Calvino on Classics



















"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino


Image: Alejandra Laviada, Before the Fall

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Something Quite Surreal









When a local Maine library was destroyed in a fire, artist Elizabeth Awalt drove over and saw something quite surreal: Hundreds of scorched pages flying around. Only the edges were burned resembling pieces of toast or even tombstones but the center of the pages were intact. She started picking up the pages, from Jean de Brunoff’s Babar, Edward Gorey, and more. She was deeply moved by these pages and remarked on how much a part of her own life these books had been. Elizabeth thought she might paint on some of them or give some to other Maine artists to paint. These pages turned into a benefit auction of works from the pages she’d recovered that day.