"In barlight alchemized: gold pate, the bellmouth
tenor, liquor trapped in a glass. The e-flat
clarinet chases time, strings shudder,
remembering the hundred tongues. Here comes old
snakeshine, scrolls stored in the well, here comes
the sobbing chazzan. O my lucky uncle,
you've escaped the Czar's army. Thunder
is sweet. Here comes the boink, boink bossa
nova slant of light. Snow-dollars
dissolve on a satin tongue. The river
swells green, concrete trembles, and we
sweat, leaning toward mikes and wires
as the last tune burns down to embers. Ash-
whispers. We were born before we were born."
– Joan Larkin, "The Combo"
"This I know at great cost:
all life is not outward,
nor is all death from within:
time writes in the ciphers
of water and rock for no one at all,
so that none may envision the sender
and no one be any the wiser."
– Pablo Neruda, from "The Traveler" in Five Decades: Poems, trans. Ben Belitt
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"And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And prys wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing."
– Ezra Pound, from "Sestina: Altaforte"
"This word is true on all the paths you tread,
As true as truth need be, when all is said:
That if you find no truth among the living
You will not find much truth among the dead."
– T. S. Eliot, from "Miscellaneous Leaves" in Inventions of the March Hare
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"What does it matter if the words
I choose, in the order I choose them in,
Go out into a silence I know
Nothing about, there to be let
In and entertained and charmed
Out of their master’s orders? And yet
I would like to see where they go
And how without me they behave."
— W. S. Graham, from "Approaches to How They Behave"
"That day. The last. Paul Celan at my house. Sitting in this chair that I have right now been staring at for a long time.
Exchange of words, closeness. His voice? Soft, most of the time. And yet it is not his voice I hear today, but his silence. It is not him I see, but emptiness, perhaps because, on that day, each of us had unawares and cruelly revolved around himself."
— Edmond Jabès, "Memory of Paul Celan" in The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
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"Together then; now I must stop short on the brink of that same abyss; she was dead. It was not enough now to draw the curtains, I tried to stop the eyes and ears of my memory so as not to see that band of orange in the western sky, so as not to hear those invisible birds responding from one tree to the next on either side of me who was then so tenderly embraced by her that now was dead. I tried to avoid those sensations that are given us by the dampness of leaves in the evening air, the steep rise and fall of mule-tracks. But already those sensations had gripped me afresh, carried far enough back from the present moment so that it should have gathered all the recoil, all the resilience necessary to strike me afresh, this idea that Albertine was dead."
– Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, 1925, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin
"Ringing the imperfect moon, and you wish you could tell him what it means.
This is what silence looks like, you think later,
and a possum lands like ordnance
on the roof, and down in the paddock
a dozen souls are reborn in the bawling cattle and the fox plays the geese
like oboes with broken reeds. Night is the world in its other life."
– Mark Tredinnick, from "Eclogues"
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"It draws towards evening as we wander about the ravine, and the cathedral towers fade in the tender light. We prepare to cross the bridge and ascend to the higher town. Very beautiful; almost unique, in this series of sketches, for quietness of colour; its bank of purple and plumy trees, against the golden light, is drawn with great care and completion."
— John Ruskin, from The Turner Bequest, on Turner's Lausanne, in Rosy Sunset, c. 1830
"The man born of the milestone is read in what will be written tomorrow and what the words express already, as if everything had been said once and had taken possession of the vast world, englobing past and future, as if our time to live only existed in abolished time, in the very abolishing which gives it a dimension beyond measure."
— Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions II, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
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"Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?"
— W. B. Yeats, "The Cold Heaven"
"A mustard-coloured car drags itself along the street
of a neighbourhood where spaces are oblong or square
then tails off into a blue garage where the engine
becomes asthmatic, kicks up, then peters out abruptly
and the man on the boiling leather waits to see if
his thoughts compose themselves after the kind of day
where thoughts are a group of white balloons
released loose and uncomprehending into the sky
and perhaps they do, because he steps out of the car
carefully with his yellow salesman's suit clean-pressed
and leaves the engine that carries him around
to head towards the bulge of white plum and magnolia
then down the little drive, to the bay window's edge
where inside, the television plays a slow Mexican wave
of businessmen and contrabandists and vendors
of Argentina who'll return later to circuits in the dust."
— Matthew Gregory, "Maradona in the Azteca" from Transmissions
"The way a lost
word
will come back
unbidden.
You're not interested
in it now,
only
in knowing
where it's been."
— Rae Armantrout, from "Unbidden"
"Divided, how can one pray? How can one pray when another oneself would be listening to the prayer?—That is why one should only pray in unknown words. Render enigma to enigma, enigma for enigma. Lift what is mystery in yourself to what is mystery in itself. There is something in you that is equal to what surpasses you."
— Paul Valéry, from "How Calm the Hour Is" in Selected Writings, trans. Louise Varèse
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"Painting has to extract the Figure from the figurative. But Bacon invokes two developments which seem to indicate that modern painting has a different relation to figuration or illustration than the painting of the past has. First, photography has taken over the illustrative and documentary role, so that modern painting no longer needs to fulfill this function, which still burdened earlier painters. Second, painting used to be conditioned by certain 'religious possibilities' that still gave a pictorial meaning to figuration, whereas modern painting is an atheistic game.
Yet it is by no means certain that these two ideas, taken from Malraux, are adequate. On the one hand, such activities are in competition with each other, and one art would never be content to assume a role abandoned by another. It is hard to imagine an activity that would take over a function relinquished by a superior art. The photograph, though instantaneous, has a completely different ambition than representing, illustrating, or narrating. And when Bacon speaks of his own use of photographs, and of the relationships between photography and painting, he has much more profound things to say. On the other hand, the link between the pictorial element and religious sentiment, in past painting, in turn seems poorly defined by the hypothesis of a figurative function that was simply sanctified by faith."
— Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith
"The gods batten on the vats, and drink up
Lovecries and memorized Chaucer, lines from movies
And songs hoarded in mortmain: exiles' charms,
The basal or desperate distillates of breath
Steeped, brewed and spent
As though we were their aphids, or their bees,
That monstered up sweetness for them while they dozed."
— Robert Pinsky, from "The Refinery"
"The pond is sheathed in ice, a duck troubles the reeds, the air around us still enough to hear the baby stir, but we don’t know where it is yet. By the force of our longing it is getting made for us, as thrilled people, palms full of seed, long for the chickadees to light, and they do. Light."
— Melanie Braverman (via)
"You press a scar on my back
with your finger
releasing memory into my body
like blood in water,
curled tea in hot water
uncurling. You ask about the small circles.
I tell you years ago the sky broke
and some pieces fell on me
as I slept shirtless in the sun,
my belly against the grass.
Each opens a small door in my body
if you touch with your tongue.
I don’t say any of this. I kiss your neck,
you turn away, hand me my shirt.
From your stoop I watch the sun
seep into the sky, a spill
that can never be cleaned.
My mouth opens and closes in the cold."
— Matthew Siegel, "What I Fail to Mention"
"To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes—
No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow?
No damns them, damns them, and so they cry.
What shape can I swallow to make me whole?
Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted wood
That fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box?
The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? Loud
Knock when the shape won’t unlock any locks.
I hear it through the static in the baby’s room
When the monitor clicks on and off, sound
Of sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks,
Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives down
Past sight, down there dark with the other blocks?
It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse,
"If you go far enough out
you can see the Universe itself,
all the billion light years summed up time
only as a flash, just as lonely, as distant
as a star on a June night
if you go far enough out.
And still, my friend, if you go far enough out
you are only at the beginning
— Rolf Jacobsen (via whiskey river)
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"'I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you,' wrote Eliot in his fragmentary drama Sweeney Agonistes (1932), painfully aware of the difficulty of exteriorizing the inner life. How is a moment of awful daring to be represented in language, not only in the language of poetry but in the daily language of letters one writes to one’s mother or sisters, to one’s fellow writers or friends? What prevents such moments from seeming merely capricious and shallow, rather than essential and irrevocable? Unlike his contemporary Virginia Woolf, whose letters, diaries, essays and manuscripts have been edited meticulously, Eliot is only beginning to be edited, and the vast majority of his writing remains uncollected in any form."
— James Longenbach, "Visions and Revisions," on the publication on volumes 1 and 2 of Eliot's letters
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"But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward."
— Amy Clampitt, from "The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews"