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 writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Saturday, April 27, 2013

A multi-colored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments






























“Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a 
 
different slant, more than anything else they know all the 
 
secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage 
 
of to force their way into consciousness.” 
 
-Christa WolfCity of Angels or Overcoat of Dr. Freud

Image #1: Alain Manesson Mallet, View of the moon, 1719

Image #2:  Earth Rise, Apollo 14, 1971
Title: Stanisław Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration [What is a poem]

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Naked and dressed in stars























     I was a great many far cries from myself. 
     -Gary Lutz
     Image: Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York
     Title:  Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop 

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

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

Thursday, April 4, 2013

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

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

So Many Stones (Or: The Turret’s Cage is Shapely)




Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for 
 
it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for 
 
it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for 
 
it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for 
 
it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place 
 
for it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the 
 
place for it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time or 
 
the place for it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the time 
 
or the place for it. Wanting to write and not being able to find the 
 
time or the place for it. Wanting to write and not being able to find 
 
the time or the place for it.

-Raymond Carver, on "things too tedious to talk about" +
Image: Gao Xingjian, Forêt vierge, 2006
Title: Anna Akhmatova, from "Solitude"

Friday, March 29, 2013

The Living Infinite



















A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
Theodore Roethke, excerpt from “The Far Field
Image: Latefa Wiersch
Title: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Monday, March 18, 2013

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

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Her pockets full of lichens and seeds
























   Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between
body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out
-Anne Carson, excerpt from “The Glass Essay”

Image: John B. Greene, Statue fragments
 
 
Title: Mary Oliver, from "Sleeping in the Forest"

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

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





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)

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

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

Saturday, February 9, 2013

The map has been barely marked





















Driving takes hold of the left brain and then the right brain is 
 
freed—that’s what some writer friends and I have theorized. 
 
But I can’t always stop when I get an idea. It depends on the 
 
road— North Dakota, no traffic. When I’m driving on a very 
 
 
empty stretch of road I do write with one hand. It’s hardly 
 
legible, but still, you don’t want to have to stop every time.” 
 
 
-Louise Erdrich

Note: Yes.
Post Note: As unimpressed as I have been with Erdrich's writing (several attempts, half-finished readings, abandoned books bedside), this quote sings.

Image: Shoji Ueda, Winter 3
Title: Gerald Murnane, Inland

Friday, February 1, 2013

I have left out the way loss changes one’s tread upon the earth


















  When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

-Anton Chekov, Fatherless

Image: Gregory Popovitch
Title: Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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)

Thursday, January 24, 2013

I have a sort of sea-feeling



















   I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.
-Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn
Image: Found
Title: Herman Melville

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Opacity












  Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die. Every means and every weapon is valid to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows - perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

-Carlo Levi

Images: Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Gottfried Wiegand, Compagnie Willi Dorner



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



Monday, January 14, 2013

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

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




Thursday, December 20, 2012

Which I is I?




















How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. 


-Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”
Image: Flickr / francyvieste
Title: Theodore Roethke, from “In A Dark Time”