Poetry and the Moon
- “…stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of then, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself…”
On Secrets
- Hearing is the first sense we gain (and the last we lose) → the experience of unborn babies being is the experience of sound with no context… “that the world is a secret.”
The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time.
Was spring a secret that winter carried? Of course it was. Spring now carries the secret of winter.
On Fear
- “The memory of pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides.” (poet Tony Hoagland) → imaginary pain, psychological torture can be more effective than physical
Madness, Rack, and Honey
- Metaphor = event = an exchange of energy between two things, helps a poem become a physical experience
- Recalls Buddhist thought of continual cycles of existence and nonexistence…
- Russ Rymer in The New Yorker, quoting philologist Heymann Steinthal: “Language is self-awareness. That is, understanding oneself… as one is understood by another. One understands oneself: that is the beginning of language.”
- The paradox that the creative process requires a lot of wasted time— but you can’t use wasted time, it just has to be wasted…
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. (Gertrude Stein)
Runaway thought, I wanted to write it; instead, I write that it has run away. (Pascal)
- “In other words, your poems speak out of your wasted time the way your life speaks out of the wasted time of your nonlife, the time that surrounds your life span.”
Someone Reading a Book
- “Am I a superfluous person because I have read more than I can possibly process, like an intake of food the body doesn’t need, or am I a superfluous person because I have gone out and bought myself a new calculator?”
- “In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?”
Short Lecture on Prayer
- Poetry happens when we raise our voices (singers, storytellers, priests) and when we lower them (secret tellers, lovers, password keepers):
Cries and whispers. A bang or a whimper. Whatever the case, if we want to be heard, we must raise our voice, or lower it.
Et cetera
When your pencil is dull, sharpen it. And when your pencil is sharp, use it until it is dull again.
- The first known act of translation? When a mother heard her baby cry, and had to decide in an instant what it meant. Q