A gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence

“I write to discover what I know.” 
-Flannery O'Connor

Image: Found
Title: George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader"

A struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light

Just as music leaves itself behind, and words have to be spoken in order to effect their disappearance, one can catch a glimmer of a life itself being a glad renunciation of itself. 

-Fanny Howe

Image: Eric Marrian, Saint Germain en laye, 2009
Title: Tomas Tranströmer, "The Open"

Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn

I have taken action against fear. I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Image: Robert Clinch, No Standing,  1998

Title: Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes 

The sky runs toward me, laughing like a child

I really don't know clouds at all.
 

-Joni Mitchell

 

Image: Found
 

Title: Yves Bonnefoy, from “The Painter Named Snow”

Both eager and afraid to fall in

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, L’Agneau Mystique (The Ghent Altarpiece), 1432
Title: Rainer Maria Rilke, from Early Journals

Sight

Elsewhere unseen.

Image: Molly Taylor sorts through a pile of eyes, London, 1933

They would rather be trees

There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries.

-Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Image: Érik Desmazières for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, 2000
Title: Margaret Atwood, Men With the Heads of Eagles

The word within a word, unable to speak a word

Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate.

-Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism 

Image: Arnold Newman, Violin shop : patterns on table, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1941
Title: T.S. Eliot from the poem, “Gerontion”

Panting.

I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely, and with the slipping away of that moment. 

-Jasper Johns

Image: Philippe Gronon, Chalk Board
Title: Stevie Smith, from “Deeply Morbid”

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 Wolf, City 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]

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 

In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space

Like a blazing comet, I’ve traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I’ve been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I’ve been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I’ve been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I’ve known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion….I’ve been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

-Antonio Tabucchi, Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa
Image: Jane Hammond. 2004.
Title: Paul Klee

Going

Image: Rosalind Solomon, Bananas, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1980

Your eyes, he said, are a train.

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to go inside your eyes, and dwell. 
 

-Sharon Olds, excerpt from the poem, “The Hour After” from The Unswept Room

 

Image: Piero del Pollaiuolo, Portrait of a Young Man, Head and Shoulders, Wearing a Cap, detail
Title: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well

Still, a great deal of light falls on everything

If tears are dropped on a dry piece of paper stained with the juice of the petals of mallows or violets, they will change the paper to a permanently green color.

-Ray Johnson, The Paper Snake, Something Else Press, NY, 1965

Image: Lewis Baltz

Title: Vincent van Gogh

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

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

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"

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

Each hung bell

       If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.

       -Simone Weil, as quoted by Anne Carson

Image: Herve Guibert
Title: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” 

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

A silence approaching bees of the invisible

Know this as well: We no longer have our words. They have withdrawn. In truth, they live, they wander among us. The face with the lost mouth.

-Henri Michaux

Image: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky
Title: Carolyn Forché

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"

A higher or less somber shore

    We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

-Tom Stoppard

Image: Uta Barth

Title: Yves Bonnefoy, The House Where I Was Born (trans. by John T. Naughton)

A strange melancholy pervades me

     The tides are in our veins.

-Robinson Jeffers

Image: Ray K. Metzker, Pictus Interruptus

Title: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

The most mysterious of domains

   We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

   -Carson McCullers

     Image: Georg Bartisch, Ophthalmodouleia (1583)

               Title: Paul Eluard

What is hidden by what we see

walking through the forest
I rearrange
the trees

-Paul Reps

Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1933
Title: Réné Magritte