Cosmopoetica

“Untitled”

Stranger and stranger to one another
waitress on her hands and knees to brush
the carpet underneath a booth. You know–
crawling around on all fours like a dog

underneath a human booth etcetera
to be human—to crawl—to

walk through broken glass with gory feet.

People crying on airplanes,
weeping seven miles above the ground,
the grief
taller than Mt. Everest:

People on the street thinking:
I wanted this. And now it’s a cloud of chalk.

A pile of blood and guts and torn bones thinking
how beautiful is the tiger who killed me

the shit/ of days

–Denis Johnson
found in The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets

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“Poetry fails, in each poem, to be as good as poetry ought to be—or as I somehow think it somewhere is, somewhere I’m not looking. Every flesh is flawed and poems are flesh.”

–Donald Hall

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“This journal of mine will offend many people. It has offended even me… I do not feel that I have been sincere; I tried too hard to have succeeded.”

–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (January 1892)

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“I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, make me talented. Peace and well being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice.”

–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (September, 1889)

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[I started noting great lines and stanzas to share from this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, but before long had in some way marked up the whole thing. I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Darwish—much less read any of his work—until a few weeks ago…]

“To a Young Poet”

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.

If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.

Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.

Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.

If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.

If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.

Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.

If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.

You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.

You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.

One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.

A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.

Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.

Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.

Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.

Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.

Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.

A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.

Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.

The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.

Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.

You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.

From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.

Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?

The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.

No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.

And last but not least, Salaam.

–Mahmoud Darwish
found in Poetry (March 2010)

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“detective or mystery convention is of course the group exposition scene at the end, in which the detective tells a gathered group, often including the culprit, what happened. If addressed to the criminal, it’s in the second person, informing the criminal of her/his own biography. The same convention is used in contemporary poetry—informing some “you” of her/his own life. No wonder it sounds accusatory.”

–Alice Fulton
notebook entry, 8/22/92

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“Krafft-Ebing—she had never of that author before. All the same she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes. She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly…”

–Radclyffe Hall
from The Well of Loneliness

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“Cherish Power – dear. Remember that it stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them.”

–Emily Dickinson
from letter #631

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“…noise is not only incidental, but essential to communication. … If, for example, a letter is written in careless or illegible script, there is interference in the reading process, which is to say that noise slows down communication.”

–Marjorie Perloff
from Radical Artifice

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“My stake as a marginalized Other … should make quite clear my empathetic relationship with quantum subjects, such as photons and electrons. … Quanta are my soul sisters. We have multiple identities. We can’t be explained away by categories which are taken to be ‘objective’, ‘natural,’ ‘universal’ –existing outside of language, gender, sexuality, humanity, space-time (culture-history).”

–Karen Barad
From “Meeting the Universe Halfway”
found in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science: A Dialogue

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“When people praise a poem that I can’t understand I always think they’re lying.”

[Boy do I understand this suspicion]

–Stephen Dunn

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All night long
sitting alongside
my dead friend
(he with white teeth
gnashed in a grin
at the pale moon
he with stiff hands
reaching for
the darkest zone
of my own silence)
        I have been writing
        love letters.

I have never
felt so much
        alive.

(after the Italian of Giuseppe Ungaretti)

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“Poets who defy making sense and do it deliberately and often brilliantly (as Ashbery can) are making a kind of sense, and may be extending the range of what poetry can do, though they ensure that poetry’s audience will be small and chiefly academic: i.e., composed of people inclined to equate a puzzle with that which is meaningful.”

–Stephen Dunn

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“A true artist will write in, as it were, small leaps, on a hundred subjects that surge unawares into his mind. In this way, nothing is forced. Everything has an unwilled, natural charm. One does not provoke: one waits.”

–Jules Renard
from The Journal of Jules Renard (September, 1887)

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“Poems for me never begin with the abstract idea of any form. You can’t set yourself to write a sonnet or villanelle. Any sonnet that makes good is a sonnet-sized explosion in heart, mind, and gut, and it sneaks up and takes you by surprise.”

–X. J. Kennedy

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This comic (from The Believer – Vol. 8, No.2)  made me laugh (click for a larger view):

You might also want to check out Eric’s short comic series: Tales to Demolish

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“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”

–David Foster Wallace

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“What is to give light must endure burning.”

–Victor Frankl

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“For every major artist whose latter works calcify into mannerism, there are a thousand minor ones who never make it that far. After all, we have only so many arrows in our quiver. To take up other weapons, and hit the target again and again? Such plasticity of attack is difficult to achieve, and beyond exhausting to maintain, and that’s not even taking into account a marketplace where brand recognition is everything, where a static, reliably “signature” style is a terrific asset. Even an artist as notoriously uncompromising as Mark Rothko chose more or less deliberately in midcareer, according to his biographer, to give the world what it already wanted from him. And what did it want? It wanted “Rothkos.” It wanted ineffable hovering rectangles of color, and more ineffable hovering rectangles of color, not some doodly semisurrealist multi-forms no one knew what to do with. And so the artist, who begins by laying siege to the precut frames of the past, and reducing them to splinters, sues for peace later and frames himself.

Not that most of us wouldn’t happily settle for this. Not that it isn’t smarter to acknowledge our limits, and keep doing what we already know we can do. And if occasionally we get a postcard from that difficult country we’ve chosen to fly over or avoid, and always on the back is the same message (HE NOT BUSY BEING BORN IS BUSY DYING), OK, we can live with that. Not everyone is a bloody fucking genius, after all.”

–Robert Cohen
found in The Believer v8n2

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“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains.”

–Alain de Botton
from The Art of Travel

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