“The way the sentence operates became connected, for me, with notions like ending-dependence and eschatological thinking. With ideas like manifest destiny, westward expansion. Imperialisms of all kinds. I began to notice how the forms our Western sensibility creates are, for the most part, ending-dependent, and that such notions of form – however unconsciously – give birth to historical strategies like the Christian one: the need for the conflagration at the end that takes what appear like random events along the way and turns them into stages. Cause and effect, the link-up into narrative, all of this dependence on closure and strategies for delay in relation to closure, you know, whiz, bang, is terrific as long as we’re thinking of it in terms of art. But when we start realizing that by our historical thinking we have created a situation whereby we are only able to know ourselves by a conclusion which would render meaningful the storyline along the way – it becomes frightening.”
— Jorie Graham. Excerpt from Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry, Jorie Graham and Thomas Gardner in Conversation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, Chapter 6.
• 6 April 2013
“But the piece of paper is just as blank tomorrow as it was yesterday, and what I’ve not written is still much more important to me than what I have written.”
— Jorie Graham. An excerpt from Daring To Live In The Details, Jorie Graham interviewed by Timothy Cahill.
• 5 April 2013
“Yes. Here and now—exactly. The terms that summon presence. In the literal sense, as well as the spiritual. Although we usually use the word to mean the presence of the greater-than-human, in that book in particular it’s the presence of others—the attempt to rebuild the shattered community of the we. It’s a very small space, that chapel. And the we we have got to live in—politically, environmentally, spiritually—is a very sacred space. Because we have to act in unison in it—or … Well, it’s dire.”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 20 March 2013
“I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion. Its syntax wants to pass something on to an other in the way that you can, for example, pass laughter on. It’s different from being persuasive and making an argument. That’s why great poems have so few arguments in them. They don’t want to make the reader “agree.” They don’t want to move through the head that way. They want to go from body to body. Built in is the belief that such community—could one even say ceremony—might “save” the world.”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 17 March 2013
“If you were to ask me now what poems need to be doing in our era, I would be right back there with Eliot insisting that fighting the dissociation of feeling from thinking is still our priority, as working artists.”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 17 March 2013
“I do worry considerably about a reader’s patience—how much mental or emotional space they have in their life in this crushingly full world to give to the reading of a poem. Many of today’s readers prefer fast poems with stated conclusions, partly because they can fit them into their day. Who can blame them? They have precious little time.”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 17 March 2013
“It’s a hard place to write past, if you understand what I mean. Writing is a hands-on operation. Writing, thinking, feeling, all hands on. How do you write to do less damage? How do you write to let the world get away from us?”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 17 March 2013
“A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.”
— Jorie Graham interviewed by Thomas Gardner in The Art of Poetry No. 85 for The Paris Review.
• 17 March 2013
“So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word.”
— An excerpt from Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler.
• 14 March 2013
“The way we narrate ourselves lies at the heart of evil. Of what do we neglect to speak? To which people, and to what acts, do we accord primacy? We are not heroes, and our narration does not make us such.”
— An excerpt from Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu.
• 9 March 2013
“
WRITING
When I write, everything is visual, as brilliantly as if it were on a lit stage. And I talk out the lines as I write.
When I was in Rome, my landlady thought I was demented. She told Frank [Merlo], “Oh, Mr. Williams has lost his mind! He stalks about the room talking out loud!”
Frank said, “Oh, he’s just writing.” She didn’t understand that.
”
— Tennessee Williams interviewed by Dotson Rader in The Art of Theater No. 5 for The Paris Review.
(Source: rimeswriting)
• 23 February 2013
“Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. “Hope is the mother of the stupid.” [This is a Polish proverb.] I don’t like hope.”
— Zbigniew Herbert. An excerpt from Conversation on Writing Poetry: An Interview with Zbigniew Herbert.
(Source: rimeswriting)
• 21 February 2013
“I want to write to you like someone learning.”
— An excerpt from Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler.
(Source: rimeswriting)
• 19 February 2013
“My book Residence on Earth represents a dark and dangerous moment in my life. It is poetry without an exit. I almost had to be reborn in order to get out of it. I was saved from that desperation of which I still can’t know the depths by the Spanish Civil War, and by events serious enough to make me meditate. At one time I said that if I ever had the necessary power, I would forbid the reading of that book and I would arrange never to have it printed again. It exaggerates the feeling of life as a painful burden, as a mortal oppression. But I also know that it is one of my best books, in the sense that it reflects my state of mind. Still, when one writes—and I don’t know if this is true for other writers—one ought to think of where one’s verses are going to land. Robert Frost says in one of his essays that poetry ought to have sorrow as its only orientation: “Leave sorrow alone with poetry.” But I don’t know what Robert Frost would have thought if a young man had committed suicide and left one of his books stained with blood. That happened to me—here, in this country. A boy, full of life, killed himself next to my book. I don’t feel truly responsible for his death. But that page of poetry stained with blood is enough to make not only one poet think, but all poets… Of course, my opponents took advantage—as they do of almost everything I say—political advantage of the censure I gave my own book. They attributed to me the desire to write exclusively happy and optimistic poetry. They didn’t know about that episode. I have never renounced the expression of loneliness, of anguish, or of melancholia. But I like to change tones, to find all the sounds, to pursue all the colors, to look for the forces of life wherever they may be—in creation or destruction.”
— An important excerpt from Pablo Neruda interviewed by Rita Guibert in The Art of Poetry No.14 by The Paris Review.
(Source: rimeswriting)
• 18 February 2013
“As Basho said, to write about the pine, you must learn from the pine.”
— An excerpt from Czeslaw Milosz interviewed by Robert Faggen in The Art of Poetry No. 70 for The Paris Review.
(Source: rimeswriting)
• 18 February 2013
