"Why poetry? Its materials are so constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It preoccupies a life, yet can only find one in living."
"One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you're actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing."
"The modest domestic circumstances of Tolstoy, the lack of comfort in Rodin's rooms - it all points to the same thing: that one must make up one's mind: either this or that. Either happiness or art. On doit trouver le bonheur dans son art [one must find happiness in one's art]: that too, more or less, is what Rodin said. And it is all so clear, so clear. The great artists have all let their lives become overgrown like an old path and have borne everything in their art. Their lives have become atrophied, like an organ they no longer use."
"She [Gertrude Stein] says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done.
"She is passionately addicted to what the french call métier and contends that one can only have one métier as one can only have one language. Her métier is writing and her language is english."
"Thought, which science has expelled from its place at the top of the spiral of evolution, reappears at the bottom of it: the physical structure of atoms and their particles is a mathematical structure, a relation. What is equally extraordinary is that this structure can be reduced to a system of signs - and is therefore a language. The power of speech is a particular manifestation of natural communication; human language is one more dialect in the linguistic system of the universe. We might add: the cosmos is a language of languages."
"In this language I have sought ... to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself."
"Poems begin for me somewhere in the middle of the middle (the poet is perpetually assigned the 'it' role in a kind of aesthetic monkey-in-the-middle game, trying to catch things from competing and irreconcilable interests and desires)."
- Charles Bernstein, from '12 of 20 questions' on Rob McLennan's blog.
Below: a still from Neil Plenge's video The Answer (2003), featuring Charles Bernstein.
"It [poetry] has to become almost like a first language."
"When I listen to public discourse, it often seems to me that people don't really hear what they're saying. Poetry should cause people to think twice about the words in their mouths. Listen longer."
- two quotes from Rae Armantrout via Here Comes Everybody.
"... the theory-of-no-theory ... is the most rigid and confining of theories, as well as the most prevalent. In every generation the theory-of-no-theory shouts loudest in the third-rate - for whom, always, 'the way to make poems is known'."
- Donald Hall, from 'Theory x Theory' in Poetry & Ambition
"One of the things I like to do when I have a space of time is sit with a stack of books, a notebook and a computer and see what happens. I'll read for a bit in one book, stop and reflect. Maybe make a note, maybe not, then continue through the stack.
"The current stack includes William T. Vollmann's Riding Toward Everywhere, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy by Jacques Derrida, Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy, and James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love.
"It's a method that sometimes makes for interesting connections that might not be made otherwise. I often read for vocabulary as much as anything else (as a poet I mean). I'm not looking to steal. I'm looking for opportunities to be jarred into consciousness of something I didn't know I was looking for."
- Tom Beckett, from a recent post on Slim Windows
"... one of my working assumptions here - what poetry has taught me, if you like - is that the reason human beings often seem to like poetic language is because they are attracted to all forms of complexity. For many readers of poetry it is precisely its opaqueness - its resistance to easily communicable 'meanings' - that is the source of its pleasurable and memorable attraction."
- Philip Mead, from the introduction to Networked Language.
"Poets who cling to a 'dark-horse' romantic investment in their own maladjusted anti-sociality ... and complain bitterly about nepotist publishing practices, cliquishness, etc. often seem to be longing for a poetic universe in which each poet is one omnipotent god complete unto him-/herself, and somehow the whole cosmos of solipsists is supposed to integrate magically into a heaven of objective purity, uncontaminated by things like friendship, desire, ambition, flattery, and other human diseases."
- K. Silem Mohammad, in an interview with Tom Beckett for e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s
"I have read - binged on - poetry since I was a very small child, but must admit that I have rarely felt passionate about more than two or three individual poems in any one publication. I 'love' poetry, in the abstract. I don't 'love' most poems, to be quite honest. Even among my most admired - say, Gwen Harwood, John Donne, TS Eliot - there is only a handful that I feel absolutely must exist if the world is to continue to function. The rest, I think, are practice: necessary, but not necessarily for public consumption."
- Jen Webb, 'Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press', Text Journal, Vol 12 No 2, October 2008.
"If you want art to be like Ovaltine, then clearly some artists are not for you; but art has always struck me most when it was to do with coping with things, often hard things, things that are difficult to take."
- Peter Reading
Image: Peter Reading, Poet by Peter Edwards
"Under certain conditions any language event can be poetry. The question thus becomes one of what are these conditions."
"The historical attraction of the arts to madness is a question of what happens if you redefine the language."
- Ron Silliman, from 'The Chinese Notebook' in The Age of Huts (compleat).
"If any human activity is sacred it is the formulation of thought in clear speech." - attributed to Ezra Pound in Noel Stock's The Life of Ezra Pound.
Below: Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis.
"at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..."
- John Keats (Letter to George & Tom Keats)
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter."
- John Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
"I also want to say that there are no rules. At least not at first there aren't. If you start with rules, you've really got a tough road. What I think is that you start with materials. You start with matter, not with rules. The rules appear, the limitations appear, and those are your limitations and the limitations of the material."
- Clark Coolidge, from Arrangement
