Go blind today already:
eternity is too full of eyes--
Paul Celan, from Breathturn
The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories.
Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will
4.7.19
Eternity buries itself in smaller things.
How desperately I have wished for memories to be eternal, but eternity exists only insofar as it buries itself in smaller things. The photograph will exist longer than I can ever remember its being taken. Even the candle which burns exists longer than my recollection of the candle or its burning—it exists but is transmogrified.
In this way, in smaller things, it is buried. In this way, maybe, I am buried too.
Anonymous asked:
how do you deal with the problem of reading poetry in translation? or is it a problem to you? do you view the translated poem as a completely separate poem?
Poetry is already strange, and estranged, even from itself. When we speak of translation, there is a phrase that comes to mind: “the poem behind the poem.” Behind every existing text there is the sense of things, the poem behind the poem, waiting, for the reader, to be unveiled. All poetry is in translation. Reading the poem, even in your native tongue, requires your participation and active translation. We modify and are modified by the language of this cultural text. To read–in the way poetry demands it be read–is to translate.
Do I think this is a “problem?” No. At least surely not in the normal sense. It is one of the things I most love about poetry. Because many of my favorite poets and poems have only ever been accessible to me in translation, I have come to think of the translated poem as a gift. Yes, it is something different from the “original” (though we must consider the tenuous nature of the original itself).
So often we focus on what is “lost in translation”–culturally, subtextually; but there is also something gained–a movement, a conversation between cultures, readers, a dialogue, and an opening in which the strangeness of language is accepted and revealed as a promise rather than a fault. A poem is a cipher, and translation deciphers.
I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes, going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the hands of whose doors are perhaps never touched; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the soul sits alone and waits.
Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories
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Colette Saint Yves, Through a cobweb
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What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
Jack Spicer, A Poem Without a Single Bird in It
Anonymous asked:
She literally felt, in this first flush, that the only company must be the human race at large, present all round her, but inspiringly impersonal.” — Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
Yes.
What distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to construct a community without collision; sociability without alienation; and a form of individual freedom that may imply solitude but not isolation?
Katja Haustein, “How to live alone with others: Notes on the Ethics of Tact”
“We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance–to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.”
I didn't know my voice, if one were given me, would be so full of grief, my sentences like cries strung together. I didn't even know I felt grief until that word came, until I felt rain streaming from me.
Louise Gluck, from The Wild Iris
“If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself in the stump outside your home, wake and walk softly through your halls. Walk softly through this house that is like your heart, built in the solace of these woods from things you claimed as your own.
Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and think of the heartbeats of the trees giving their lives, each swaying wood grain a skipped beat of gasping titans beneath your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle push, the settling of these quiet things.
But your hands are not in this house. Your heart is not in this house. Your love is not in this house. This house was not built from tall, certain things, but from the surest things you could find: roots, nests, not clocks but the parts hidden behind their faces, reminders of belief in always moving forward.
One morning you will wake in this home that is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump outside, you will touch everything roughly, this house will sound no longer like your heart but your heart will sound like this house, built tall from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes, stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You will burn it to the ground.”
-- Lewis Mundt, “After Stephen Dunn”
The whole content of my being shrinks in contradiction against itself.
Experience is surely a debate.
Soren Kierkegaard
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins
This gossamer, this shade of mind, this breathing, this small sleep, this Heraclitean, this circumference, this frame of thought, this root system, this plane leaf, this noumena, this stream, this thought that is called I, this habit, this clockwork, this handiwork, this ghost house, this neighbor, this harbor, this topography, this desperate scraping, this language, this fractal light, this.
Kristen Case, “Haecceity,” from TEMPLE
Anonymous asked:
What is your opinion of cut up? The free verse poets in the vein of Pound, Olson, and Snyder? What is your vision of the ideal poetics/poetry, where do you see it going, how can it get there, or should we instead align ourselves with the inherited poetic traditions?
I neither believe in nor find possible the notion of an “ideal” or “inherited” poetics, insofar as anything (and everything) is arguably ideal (and everything is certainly inherited). Cut up, erasure, projectivist, free verse — many of these forms and schools, by taking verse, lines, conceits from past works, force us to see the intertextual nature that constitutes all writing. When, say, one “cuts,” rearranges, or erases a poem to bring to light another, possible poem, one illuminates the infinite possibility of language, the infinity of language. The poem lying in wait behind (or above, or to the left or right of) the poem. Thus, I do not think it is possible for a poem to exist autonomously, apart from other poems. Western “canonical” poets (what you might call the traditional poets) — Yeats to Byron to Keats — approach the poem as if it could, somehow, exist autonomously: a gift from the suspended will of (original) genius. Thus, their poetry enacts this while ignoring the vast body of language it relies on to enact itself (what Eliot later called the anxiety of influence). If I could call any poetic endeavor “ideal” — which is something I am incredibly hesitant to do — it would be any and all endeavors which not only pay homage to but are overtly aware of their predecessors (and by predecessors I mean the entirety of language itself) often in an arguably destructive way — where the language fails in its inability to grasp the immensity of itself and all it is responding to, all it could possibly be. Put more simply: give me ten words and I will show you an infinity of poems, not only in the order of the words but in their space on the page, their materiality, their sound, their weight. I think the Black Mountain poets and the language poets came close. I think Paul Celan came close. No one can ever succeed because language would have to break itself entirely to succeed. The perfect poem is silence, not the signifer.
Silence, not the signifier.
Indeed poetry is bounded by silence on all sides, is almost defined by silence.
Hayden Carruth, “Fallacies of Silence,” Selected Essays & Reviews