An orgy of loose ends

   "…There is some line running through her body like a wick....I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life."

-Mary Gordon

Title: Via Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

Image: Sebastião Salgado, Full View of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, Brazil, 1986

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”

At First I Knew it Not

There is the paper and then there is the person.

-Francesca Woodman (NY Review of Books)

Image: Found 
Title: Currer Bell

Writing with my eyes instead of my hands

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

-Theodore Roethke

Image: James Renwick, First principles of natural philosophy 

Title: Mary Ruefle 

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

Furrow and Word

Joseph Conrad, landlocked but reliving the sea, wrote much of his work with a favorite pen.

-Joshua Cohen, “The Font of the Hand”

Image: Bianca Brunner, Split, 2010

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions (Rosmarie Waldrop, translator)

I understand the language of waves

"Everything begins with a story."

-Joseph Campbell

Image: Erich Hartmann, Pair of shoes on deck, Carribbean, 1984
Title: Thanks to Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus)

A Stranger on the Riverbank

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

-Ursula Le Guin, "Winged: the Creatures on my Mind," in Harper's, 1990

Image: Found
Title: Nod to Mahmoud Darwish, from “Who Am I, Without Exile?” from The Butterfly’s Burden

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”

What do I make of all this texture?

“‘Some days I feel like playing it smooth,’ I said, ‘and some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.’” 

-Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business

Image: Found

Title: Nod to Annie Dillard

What Geomancy

"For words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners. Not for them to bring down treasures from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ bowels."

-Franz Kafka, in a letter written to Selma Kohn 
[Source: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston]

[Image: Thomas Moglu]

The Flair of Great Loneliness There

+

A euphoria of trees

 

 

 

“Do you remember the day we wanted
to describe everything? We saw a
euphoria of trees…”
 

-Lisa Robertson

 

[Image: Lord Snowdon]

Open the window

"Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it."
-Robert Creeley



Image: Page Tsou, Feathers on the Sky

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

This Terrestrial Crust

"The frequency is courage."
-The fictional Dan Rather in the 2006–07 graphic novel Shooting War
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A World Without Water

"Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.”
-Richard Flanagan

Images:

(1) Pierre Belon, Monk Fish from Harvard University Library’s copy of ‘De Aquatilibus’

(2) Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt - كتاب عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) by Zakarīyā’ ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī, originally published in 1283. 

Writing: An Infinite Question

A “journey of profundity and solitude across measureless oceans.”
-Giorgio de Chirico

Image: Mark Tansey, Wheel of Language

RIP Ray Bradbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
-Ray Bradbury

Image: Samuel Clemens (yes, the one)

 

RIP Ray Bradbury: August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012, age 91)