If you go to Wendy Videlock’s blog soon enough, you can read her short poem Said the Sculptor (from May 21st) before it ends up a mile down the page. . .
thehandindreaming
Jennifer Intan Burch
April 7, 2012
look forward to reading Bei Dao (and to the wizard who will teach me Chinese)
April 2, 2012
I read Philip Larkin while living in England, paying attention to landscape and architecture, to light and dark, almost like photographs made of sound. I don’t remember thinking about him as praying as much as capturing, celebrating, lamenting, or just saying. Click here for the latest article that brought him to mind. One of the interesting things about Larkin is how many people, with varying beliefs (or disbelief), use his words to stand in for their own.
February 19, 2012
Where learning bled
Where learning left and left us red
I’ve been reading and thinking about Robert Frost the past few days (the words above are mine, not his). I wanted to include an image of my hometown, Granby, CT, but I don’t have one—because it’s the place I first heard and read Frost. As a child, I found a notebook in our house with “The Road Not Taken” written by hand, without an attribution. I wondered then if one of my parents wrote it. Later I studied with Bill Pritchard at Amherst, who told us that when Frost taught, he threw their papers down the stairs and graded each according to where it landed.
In “The Last Refinement of Subject Matter: Vocal Imagination,” Frost wrote: “Poets have lamented the lack in poetry of any such notation as music has for suggesting sound. But it is there and always has been there. The sentence is the notation. The sentence is before all else just that: a notation for suggesting significant tones of voice. With the sentence that doesn’t suggest significant tones of voice, poetry has no concern whatever.” Neither William Carlos Williams nor Wallace Stevens worked in this way; in fact, I can’t think of another American poet of Frost’s era that did, but maybe you can?
About seven years ago, I decided to work more deliberately with rhyme in my poems, and gave myself the task of writing only things I could remember and speak. I don’t think this was a great success in terms of what I produced, but it was helpful in terms of returning to the kind of song that drew me to poetry in the first place. A fellow poet said he heard Frost in the poems. For sure I didn’t manage the kind of sentences Frost speaks of; most of the poems were one long sentence. I thought I’d record them tonight and then opened the file and it was 38 pages, so I just did a few. The one that begins with “Weeping turns” is probably the closest in cadence to Frost. It’s hard not to think of Yeats saying “Rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the imagination”. If you have patience, you can listen here.
February 16, 2012
Some words Antonio Machado wrote about his book, The Countryside of Castile (1912), translated by Robert Bly in Times Alone:
“We are victims, I thought, of a double hallucination. If we look outward, and concentrate on entering things, our external world begins to lose solidity, and if if we conclude that it exists not in and for itself, but exists because of us, it ends by dissolving. . .
However, if, moved by our private reality, we turn our eyes inward, then the world pushes in on us, and it is our interior world, our being, that disappears. What to do then?”
*photo by Debora Koyama
Perhaps Borges begins to answer at the end of his essay, The Wall and the Books:
“The firm wall, which at this and in every moment casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is likely that, aside from the conjectures it permits, this idea itself move us. (Its virtue may reside in its opposition, on an enormous scale, between constructing and destroying.) Generalizing upon this, we might infer that all forms possess their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would accord with Benedetto Croce’s thesis; and Pater had already, in 1877, asserted that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces scored by time, certain twilights, certain places, all want to tell us something, or told us something we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something. This imminence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the esthetic fact.” – Translated by Irving Feldman
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February 13, 2012
I might be progressing or returning because I no longer get metaphysical when I have a cold. I do, however, always remember lines from Pessoa’s “I have a terrible cold”:
I have a terrible cold.
And everyone knows how terrible colds
Change the whole structure of the universe,
Making us sore at life,
Making us sneeze til we get metaphysical. . .
* photo by Debora Koyama
I must have had a different form of fever brain when I wrote the following (published by The Poetry Porch),
Besotted striving brain
what do you believe?
you’re a lover staking all
but unwilling to receive
you need you want you crave
you sleepless thriving brain
why the endless longing?
why not let it rest
and let us hear your hotly
beating chest!
You can listen to me almost sing it here, which makes me think of another line from Pessoa’s poem, I never was well unless I was stretched out across the universe.
February 12, 2012
* photo by Debora Koyama
click here to listen
