Cosmopoetica

“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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“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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“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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“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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As seen on Ed Byrne’s Assemblage:

"Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check. You can use up too much of your intellectual and emotional capital, not to mention your good will, and come away feeling had. Or you can pat your billfold and say, ‘Hey, this baby just got a little fatter.’

"When I’m asked by fellow air passengers what I do for a living and reply, ‘I write poems,’ the reaction is often a startled smile, as though they’re thinking Homer! Dante! Milton! (At least that’s what I’m thinking they’re thinking.) And then comes the lean-in, the furrowed brow, the voice thick with compassion as my new friend says, ‘But there isn’t any money in that, is there?’

"There are some pretty snappy comebacks to this one, but what I usually offer is Somerset Maugham’s ‘Poetry is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.’ Actually, Maugham says ‘money,’ not ‘poetry,’ but that’s the point. Money and poetry both act as catalysts, and they bring together objects and experiences that wouldn’t have anything to do with one another otherwise. Wealth takes many forms, and sometimes it shows up as stanzas."

–David Kirby in the New York Times Sunday Book Review

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[image by ThomasThomas]

And as for the music of poetry, that special music I mentioned, it is imperceptible to some; unimportant for most; for others it is the object of abstract research, sometimes scientific and nearly always sterile. I know that honest efforts have been made to deal with the difficulties of this subject, but I fear that this energy has been misplaced. Nothing is more misleading than those so-called "scientific methods" (in particular, measurements and recordings) which always permit a "fact" to be given in answer to a question, even if it is absurd or badly put. Their value (like that of logic) lies in the way they are used. The statistics, the marks on wax, the chronometric observations of which are used to solve entirely "subjective" problems of origin or trend, do indeed say something; but here, instead of resolving our difficulties and ending all controversy, the oracles merely introduce a naïvely disguised metaphysics under the forms and apparatus of the material of physics.

Even if we measure the footsteps of the goddess, note the frequency and average length, we are still far from the secret of her instantaneous grace.

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What is honorable in "so it goes" and in the mournful brilliance of Barthelme’s stories … in Speedboat, in the conundrums of V. is the intelligence that questions the shape of life at every point. It is important to concede the honor, the nerve, the ambition– important even if it is hard to believe anyone in the world could be happier reading Gravity’s Rainbow than reading Dead Souls.

–Elizabeth Hardwick
from "The Sense of the Present"

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[photo by Esther G]

I didn’t know I would ever want to be a writer when, at seventeen, I started to keep a journal. And my early entries reveal nothing but the insanity of that dream. I transcribed poems by my then heroes, Dickinson and Eliot and Frost, and practiced explicating them. Observe my inchoate insight:

"In this poem it occurs to me now that Dickinson seems to maybe be concerned with death."

It wasn’t long before I was writing lengthy descriptions, full of dashes, of my solitary walks through snowy Virginia woods, peppered with phrases in Latin, a language I never studied. I composed metered lines about stars and the moon that used the word sublunary as if I’d bought it at cost. Then there were the girls, my nauseating desire for, my persistent lack of success with– their names light as sundresses: Lindsey, Katie, Kristine, Ginny, Cara. Reading back through these entries now gives me a sensation something like when you put your hand up against another person’s and massage the twinned middle fingers, a charge of the familiar and the utterly mysterious. That is and cannot be me.

–Cheston Knapp

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"I’ve written little because there’s so much not to be said."

–from The Journals of Leonard Michaels

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Interviewer
Tu Fu is a kind of reporter.

Frank Bidart
Exactly. There’s always a pane of glass between you and what you desire. We live in a world where we are surrounded by people who tell us you can break the pane of glass if you do one thing or another: if you believe in psychoanalysis, Scientology or Marx. They all say there’s a way to break the pane of glass, and the poems clearly do not find a way to break the pane of glass.

Interviewer
What I’ve always related to so much in your work is the notion that the poems are a kind of fog on the glass, so you can see it.

Bidart
To be able to describe that structure is itself a way to get beyond the pane of glass, not just to be at its mercy.

–Frank Bidart
from Tin House Review, Summer 2008

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Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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Interviewer

Did you ever think of giving up?

Kay Ryan

I didn’t have anything to give up to.

–Kay Ryan
from “The Art of Poetry #94″
(Paris Review, Winter 2008)
(noted by Jared)

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The difficulty of it [writing] cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the real world.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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Interviewer

What can “trip” your mind?

Kay Ryan

People can do it, but honestly, it’s writing. The only real access that I have to my mind is when I’m writing.

One of the best ways to get started writing is to read something of thrilling quality. I never read poetry or fiction, and anything that smacks of usefulness–science or biography–is off limits. Essentially, I read literary essays. I like superarrogant, high-level, brainy essays about aesthetics. I had a Nabokov jag for a couple of years: his Lectures on Literature. Kundera has two beautiful books of essays. There’s also Calvino’s Six Essays for the Next Millennium. Herbert has that wonderful book Still Life with Bridal. Brodsky is another one…

–Kay Ryan
from “The Art of Poetry #94″
(Paris Review, Winter 2008)

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It’s poetry’s uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this talk of usefulness makes me feel I’ve suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is a practical language. Conversation is a practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it’s paralyzing to think of poetry and usefulness in the same breath.

–Kay Ryan
from “The Art of Poetry #94″
(Paris Review, Winter 2008)

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Interviewer

Why do you tend to write short lines?

Kay Ryan

Edges are the most powerful parts of the poem. The more edges you have the more power you have. They make the poem more permeable, more exposed.

–Kay Ryan
from “The Art of Poetry #94″
(Paris Review, Winter 2008)

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