Cosmopoetica

“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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“Things fit together. We knew that–it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never by itself alone.”

–Jack Spicer
from “Second Letter”

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“Muses do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with explication – that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it doesn’t get into the poem, that they whisper (if you let yourself really hear them), “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s go to bed.”

[…]

Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror?

In themselves, no. Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection.

This letter is to you because you are my publisher and because the poem I wrote for you gives the most distorted reflection in the whole promenade. Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.”

–Jack Spicer
from “First Letter”

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“Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

I repeat—the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.”

–Jack Spicer
from “Second letter to Federico Garcia Lorca”

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[CC licensed image by a.drian]

As an enthusiastic snail-mail letter writer—you might remember those paper things, physically transported in little paper sleeves with “stamps” on them– Thomas Mallon’s new book Yours Ever: People and Their Letters looks fascinating (as does his earlier book on diaries and journals). An excerpt from the New York Times review:

Think of a letter, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his daughter, as “a kind of picture of a voice.” Mallon recognizes letters as well to be monuments, marathons, performance art. He neglects neither Ann Landers nor the Unabomber. By way of unexpected detours — Jean Harris turns into the Madame de Sévigné of the prison world — he delivers up epistolary swooning, stroking, wincing, mulling, composting. For the most part the transitions are fluid, but occasionally he makes a jarring turn, swerving, for example, not altogether safely, from Eudora Welty to Thomas Jefferson. But his book is meant to be a ramble, a loose-limbed survey of that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, boastful, sulky, brooding, nuts — emotions for which the letter (and that extinct species, the unsent letter) have always been the perfect medium. “We are most essentially ourselves when frantic and fidgety,” Mallon observes — you can always tell a novelist at 100 yards — and this is a book of shirttails untucked and egos exposed. With good reason “Yours Ever” takes as its hero Charles Lamb, author of “mood-driven miniatures,” precisely what Mallon has knit together here.

Looks like something for my Christmas list (if I can resist ordering it as soon as I hit the “publish” button here).

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"I sat on the wharf and watched the little steamers dipping their funnels to get under the bridge, and it opening for a big boat to go under. Tres emouvant. That’s all I do now–go out about 2 and find some place to sit till the pubs open and get back here about 7 and cook liver and read the Evening News. I couldn’t stand the British Museum any more. Plato & Artistotle & the Gnostics finished me. I bought the Origin of Species yesterday for 6d and never read such badly written catlap. I only remember thing: *blue eyed cats are always deaf* (correlation of variations). I finished Vanity Fair and Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work…. I bought Moby-Dick today for 6d. That’s more like the real stuff. White whales & natural piety… I haven’t opened my mouth except in bars & groceries since you left this day week: to haughty barpersons and black-souled grocers. About going where I don’t know. I suppose I must go home. I haven’t tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous… if I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, a short story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am all right. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured."

–Samuel Beckett
from 1932 letter

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“More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.”

–Samuel Beckett
from a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun

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I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read–I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that School.

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“America, it’s true, either spoils you with success or withers you with neglect. What other morality has the artist but to endure? The only ones who survive, I think, beyond the equally destructive temptations of self-praise and self-pity, are those whose ultimate discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.”

–James Wright quoting a letter from Stanley Kunitz
from a letter to James Dickey, 1958

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From a brief Slate article on the recently released, forty-year old letters from Hillary Clinton to a college friend:

…the letters also filled me with nostalgia for letter-writing itself. Though I won’t pretend that this activity is morally preferable to e-mail or instant messaging, letter-writing certainly was stylistically preferable. Letters had a beginning, a middle, and a carefully crafted conclusion. Effort was exerted to make them discursive, amusing, and readable.

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Heidi links to a LifeHacker article about the new “Forever Stamps” which can be purchased for 41 cents but will remain good for sending first-class letters “forever” (or until the USPS goes belly-up).

Now, I understand that this is a good investment. But these stamps are ugly. The only time I send items in the mail anymore are for personal letters (and I do write a lot of them)… and unless I were desperate I’d never use this stamp. Philately may be dying, but why kick it when it’s down? Use a real stamp people…

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