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”

Between the Cry and Silence

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G. K. Chesterton

Image: Salvador Dalí, The portrait of Federico García Lorca 
Title: From Octavio Paz, “André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning. Alternating Current” 

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)

Some of the Fragments of the Afternoon

 

“ A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”

-e. e. cummings 

Image: Sumach in Autumn (Pittsfield, Mass.) 

Title: Nod to T. S. Eliot, from "Hysteria"

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”

They Dream That They Have Eyes

-Jean-Pierre Boulé, Hervé Guibert: voices of the self

Like a flag, I am surrounded by distances

The map is more interesting than the territory.

-Attributed, in a roundabout way, to Michel Houellebecq



Image: A chart of the Canarie and Madera Islands, ca. 1702-1707, NYPL Digitial Gallery
Title: Rilke, from Book of Images

Projects working to restore sight and prevent eye disease

Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see…

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: Raoul Hausmann, Untitled, February, 1931.
Title: Thanks to Banksy

The astonished places you inhabited and left

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.

-Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures”


Image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980
Title: Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

The song that is the bird unseen

In India they tell the future from the flight of birds.

-Eliot Weinberger, “The Dream of India”

Image: Joaquim Pla Janini, Mariposas de le Caridad 

Title: Nod to William Carlos Williams, excerpt from “To All Gentleness” 

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

The Tall Sky of Hope

And at dawn, armed with ardent patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

-Arthur Rimbaud

Image: Taddeo di Bartolo, San Gimignano, detail, c. 1391 
Title: Marin Sorescu, from “Fountains in the sea” 

Blue Desert with Dunes of Rain

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Image: Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes with Peacock Feather, 1939 +

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, from “After the Deluge” as found in If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Every man has a piece of sky in his breast and in it flies a swallow

I actually saw it happen. A bird falling from the roof of a building. The bird let out a little cry as it dropped—one story, two—then, just as if it had hit something solid in the air, it bounced into flight. Hardly back on the roof, it was falling again, and falling, letting out that cry. But were the falls failed attempts at flight? The bird seemed to be throwing itself off the roof—falling on purpose. Out of the plunge perfected, flight pushed up as necessity. There was thrust behind it—the fear of falling. And with each practice fall, the cry lasted longer until the cry became a run of notes, a flutter along the avifaunal scale. Out of the fall, the cry shivered up and down, the natural embodiment of thrill. Suddenly, I understood. The bird wasn’t practicing flight. It knew how to fly. The bird was teaching itself how to sing.

-Susan Mitchell, "Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding"

Images:
1st image: found
2nd image:  Front and back of a page from Aram Saroyan’s Pages
3rd image: Blake Ogden, Bird and the moon
4th image: found
5th image: Etienne-Jules Marey, Analysis of the Flight of a Seagull, 1887
6th image: found

Title: Nod to Fatos Arapi, Sultan Murat and the Albanian

We say forest but this word is made of the unknown

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
-Gustave Flaubert


Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brie, France, 1968
Title: Nod to Witold Gombrowicz

Forget what country you are in

"His hand an encyclopedia, his hair air..."


Text and image: Roland Penrose, Portrait, 1939

Title: Nod to W.S. Merwin, excerpt from "Exercise"(which could/should be its own post -- forthcoming)

Hesitantly, like scattered islands

"We go forward and backward, and there is no place."
-Rosmarie Waldrop, "Conversation 4: On Place,” from Reluctant Gravities +

Image: Danny Lyon, The Walls: Cell Block Table, 1964
Title: Nod to Rilke (who else?), from The Book of Hours I, 18

A Blue Rinse to the Language

 

 

"From childhood he dreamed of being able to keep with him all the objects in the world lined up on his shelves and bookcases. He denied lack, oblivion or even the likelihood of a missing piece. Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them."
-Anne Carson, Short Talks


Image: Athanasius Kircher, Noah’s Ark, 1675

Title: Nod to John Ashberry

Like Thread Through a Needle

 

“Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”

― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow 

Image: Thomas J. Abercrombie, Afghan Woman in Chadri, Afghanistan,  1968

Title: Nod to W. S. Merwin

Swans, Amputees

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

-Colin Wilson

Image: John Vink, Pomarico, Apulia, Italy, 1983 +

Title: Nod to Erica Baum

One Livid Flame

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

Image: Tomoko Yoneda, Joyce’s Glasses - Viewing a letter to Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, 1998 
Title: Nod to James Joyce, Ulysses

Why are you here?

[This place is a quiet place, isn't it? I don't mind it.]

Photo: Paris flooded, Historical Library of Paris

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

+

Ovid is weeping

In the troubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.

-René Daumal, Mount Analogue

 
Image: Josef Sudek
Title: Nod to Anne Carson, from "Short Talk on Ovid" as found in Short Talks

The primordial tower

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 2



Image: Andrey Zakirzyanov,  The battle of celestial bodies, 1994

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]

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

Image: Akos Major

The Map or the Territory

"While ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Image: Paul Nougé, The Juggler, c. 1929-1930
Title: Nod to Michel Houellebecq

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

Alluvion

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

-Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

Image: Richard Serra, Serpentine, 1993