Consider incompleteness as a verb

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Plate photographed through tissue. The frontispiece to The Giant-Killer: or, The Battle Which All Must Fight, by A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker, 1856). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 12, 2006.
Title: Anne Carson, Plainwater

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

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

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

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

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)

A psychic state achievable through geography

    Ancient exiles,
 Tell me about your seas…

   -Arthur Rimbaud, from “Comedy of Thirst”

 Image: Found
 Title: Nod to Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

An inevitable locomotive

We must admit there will be music despite everything.*

-Jack Gilbert, "A Brief for the Defense"

*"Poetry, for me," he declares in a 1965 essay, "is a witnessing to magnitude." In poems he sings of a "magnitude of pain, of being that much alive," and "a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace." +

Yes. And yes.

[R.I.P., Jack. 11.11.12]

Image: Etienne Martin, Le Manteau, 1962

To make this place another

It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.
-Marguerite Duras

Image: Petah Coyne, Untitled # 735 (Monks II), 1992
Title: Susan Sontag from the essay, “Unguided Tour”