I am Not Resigned

I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

—Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn

Image: Eduard Bezembinder

Title: Nod to Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpt from “Dirge Without Music”  

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

The School of Water

I hear they call life
the only refuge.

-Paul Celan

Image: Leif Podhajsky, Love, Forever Changes


Titulo: Gracias a Pablo Neruda, de “Seas,” traducido por William O’Daly

Saudade

(Portuguese): Nostalgia for what might have occurred.

 
Image: Otto Steinert, Boulevard St Michel, Paris, 1952

This Terrestrial Crust

"The frequency is courage."
-The fictional Dan Rather in the 2006–07 graphic novel Shooting War
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Scaffolding for Meaning

Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.

-Donald Barthelme

Image: Anders Beer Wilse, Norway, Hardangerjöklen, ca 1908.
Title: Nod to Diego Marani (phrase from New Finnish Grammar)

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

Shakespeare Insult Kit

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

I am the arrow shaft

 

I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. 

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Photo: courtesy of NASA

The language of birds

What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

-Stanley Kunitz

Title: Thanks to Rene Guenon, The Language of Birds


Photo: Gertrude Käsebier

A story is not compulsory

"What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make, to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough…"

-Beckett, Texts for Nothing #4

Art: Alighiero Boetti Mettere, (1978) ballpoint pen on paper

The fundamental impermanence of things

…as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

-John Ashbery, Three Poems 

Image: Ann Hamilton, untitled (from Body Object series, 1984-88

Title: Maggie Nelson, Bluets

The ecstatic love of a young writer

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

—Charles Bukowski

Image: Dirk Nijland, Angler on the river Maas, Rotterdam

Title: Nod to Vladimir Nabokov

Kinds of light unlike any other

 It is not down in any map; true places never are.
-Herman Melville 

And:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
-Richard Wilbur, excerpt from the poem, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World”

Image: found

Title: Nod to Anne Carson

I have no face

 

 

 

 

 

“But here I am nobody. I have no face. (…)
‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder - that face is my face.
But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face…’”

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

[Image found here]

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)

The repository of unlived things

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Pilgrimage in Rilke’s Book of Hours

Image: Found

Ceci n’est pas un blog

A summary:

• This is not a blog.
• Blog is a four-letter-word.
• Don't comment. (the trail)
• Don't allow comments. (the time)
• Don't feed the trolls.
• Blogs are not platforms or pedestals. (Platforms are for shoes. Pedestals are for plants.)
• Blogs are not novels.
• Blogs cannot replace the novel you meant to write but didn't.

Title: thanks to René Magritte 

Art:  René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

Delirium perhaps

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

-Samuel Beckett

Image: Emmet Gowin, Pivot Agriculture, Washington, 1987

Symphonies without movements, operas without words

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind.

-George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

Image: The Musarithmetic Ark, attributed to Athanasius Kircher, 1650

Title thanks to: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible 
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible


[beauty].      
 
Photo: © Massimo Listri, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Italy, 2002

A renaissance of wonder

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.
—Ferlinghetti
 

Image: The Virgin of Guadalupe, inscribed: VERA EFFIGIES/B.[Beatae]V.[Virginis] MARIA...

Everything is

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, p. 23 [translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

Photo: Inge Morath, Courtyard and portal, Masjid-e Shah, Isfahan, Iran, 1956

My house was a house of winds

 

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

―Clarice Lispector, Passion according to G.H. 

[Title thanks to Dana Levin's poem,"The Weatherman"]

Acclivity (n):

acclivity (n): an ascending slope
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010.

Photo: Found

Spring at Night

the news arrived that this time we would only see the spring at night and that a spider crawls across the paper where I’m writing that the gift is here

-Pablo Picasso, The Burial Of The Count Of Orgaz & Other Poems

Photo: Adam Putnam, Untitled (wisp) (2007)

A rush of friendship for stones and grasses

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have — positively — a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang — there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.
 

—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Image: Arab manuscript, ca. 1766, Traité d’hippiatrie

My postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”

-Carlos Fuentes, RIP (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012)

Image: Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, drawing of a microscopic section through one year old ash wood

Title: Nod to Anne Sexton

Trembling Emblems

Life is it’s own rescue, for we — at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems
 

-Emily Dickinson

[Note: I've replaced Dickinson's love for life]

Image: Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970

Read Obituaries

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

-Charles Wheelan

Image: Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Mountain, 1980-1982

The Poet & Nonrecognition

-Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Foreignness

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: Georgiana Kelly, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Over your body the clouds go high

 All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.

—Richard Brautigan

Image: Charles Cushman
Title: Sylvia Plath (from Gulliver)

Cézanne on Nothing

 
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

-Paul Cézanne

Photo: Imogen Cunningham

It is commonly thought

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.
-Agnes Martin

Image: matchbook

Each poem is a resurrection

 Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion.

-Jacques Derrida

Photo: Carolin Gutt, Shock

What are those things?**

— What are those things
that shine in the sky,
— I asked my mother.

— Bees, she answered

Every night since then,
my eyes eat honey.

-Humberto Ak abal

**NOTE: April is National Poetry Month. Do yourself a favor and read a poem today. 


Image: Hollie Chastain, Fresh Courage

When the words become palpable

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker

Image: Adolf Wölfli, Rosalia Walther, Owner of the Grand-Hotel on Mount Neveranger, 1911

Title: Nod to John Ashbery

A miracle unfolding in the dark

The world is a miracle unfolding in the pitch dark. We are lighting candles.

-Barry Lopez

Image: Vija Celmins, 1996

Would you die for spring?

You knock

without knowing that you knocked. The door

opens on a century of clouds and centuries

of centuries of clouds. The bird sings

among the toyons in the spring’s diligence

of rain. And then what? Hand on your heart.

Would you die for spring? What would you die for?

Anything?

-Robert Hass from "Berkeley Eclogue" 

Image: Alasdair Wallace, A flock of birds, 1999

The Radical of Writing

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”
―Eudora Welty

Image: Yto Barrada, Family Tree, 2009

The Physicality of Writing

I discovered the tongue and the lips of my heart. Since then I have not had a mouth.

—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Photo:  Edward S. Curtis

Getting Lost(er)

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in… in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2005




Image: Paul Harbutt, At world’s End II, 2007