The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish. When the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the ideas are forgotten.
Where can I find a person who has forgotten words? That person is the one I would like to talk to.
- Chuang-Tzu
I found these wise words in the New York Times obituary for Normal Mailer who died November 10, 2007. I believe they are from an interview in 2001 in which he also declared that he thought the novel as a form was "on the way out."
"It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist. And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words."
Sobering for those of us typing away during this National Novel Writing Month. And for the hordes who are down at the Wordstock literary festival for a book fair and other lit-celeb events this weekend...
Found as you scroll through the website of Open Books: A Poem Emporium
a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, Washington.
"The HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE"
--Charles Olson
"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."
--Emily Dickinson
"For me, everything in poetry should be out of place."
--Anna Akhmatova
"One reads poetry with one's nerves." --Wallace Stevens
"Successions of words are so agreeable." --Gertrude Stein
"Art is about experience (in the same sense that a cat indoors is "about" the house). --Allen Grossman
"Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics."
--Anna Swir
"A poem is untoward." --Heather McHugh
"With a changing key
You unlock the house where
The snow of what's silenced drifts." --Paul Celan
From Chekhov's play, "The Seagull"—words spoken by Teplev as he struggles with his writing, near the play's end in Act IV:
"I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's not a question of new or old forms, but the act of writing itself, with no thought for what's new or old, but writing as it freely pours from the heart. "
Earlier, in Act I, the doctor Dorn offered Teplev this bit of advice:
"There must be a clear and definite purpose to what you do. You have to know what you are writing for; if you embark on the artist's path without a clear aim, you will delude yourself and your talent will destroy you."
Touche!
Useful to remember for all endeavors, all creative work:
Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Read a number of these in his lovely book, Haiku: This Other World today as well. I am beginning to think that might be the mark of a true writer, versatility across genres, facility with words first and foremost. Near the end of his life, Wright wrote over 4000 haiku; this collection is the 817 he preferred. This one jumped out—one day I may put it on a memorial stone for Balthazar:
The cat's shining eyes
Are remarkably blue
Beside the jonquils.
Life is nice but it lacks form. It’s the aim of art to give it some.
—Jean Anouilh
...words to read at a memorial gathering for a writer, many writers present, not that that matters.
I am favoring Theodore Roethke, an excerpt from "The Lost Son" -- now I have to track down the entire poem:
"Light traveled over the wide field:
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone.
Throught the clear air, in the silence.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive.
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
Back from our trip where poetry was in the stones, the facades, the window shutters and iron grillwork in the calles of Venice, the stradum of Dubrovnik, the white shiny marble streets of medieval towns on the Adriatic islands of Korkula and Hvar. An essay on Muzak, read in the New Yorker while travelling, talked about its enemy being silence. Then, today, stumbled on this Charles Simic (originally from Belgrade, Yugoslavia) quote:
"Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices."
After three weeks away, I return to my writing life con spirito, con brio. The world around me, outside this writing room windows, sings of green, of growing, of spring.
Anyone with a passion for truth will of necessity be original.
--Wallace Stevens
"Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained."
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Gary Snyder's words from the introduction to Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry struck a chord with me today:
"Language is not something you learn in school, it is a world you're born into. It's part of the wildness of Mind. You master your home tongue without conscious effort by the age of five. Language with its sinuous syntax is not unlike the thermal dynamics of weather systems,or energy exchanges in the food chain—completely natural and vital, part of what and who we are. Poetry is the leap off—or into—that."
...according to the late Susan Sontag in an essay, The Truth of Fiction Evokes Our Common Humanity:
"Love words. Agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world...Be serious. By which I [mean]: Never be cynical. And which doesn't preclude being funny. And if you'll allow me one more: Take care to be born at a time when it was likely you could still be exalted and influenced by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov...The writers who matter most to us are those who enlarge our consciences and our sympathies and our knowledge."
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of the pain we all have.
--Lionel Trilling
Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.
--Vincent van Gogh
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
--Henry Ward Beecher
From Bob's memoir, Chronicles Volume 1:
"Art is unimportant next to life...creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination and if any one of these key elements is missing, it doesn't work."
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose
and poetry; that is, prose, - words in their best order; poetry, - the best
words in their best order.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Below is my Top Twenty from the Nuts and Bolts chapter of Hugo's book, The Triggering Town. I've shortened a bit and, of course, eliminated his examples and discussion. Hugo was writing about poetry. I think some of these are applicable to all writing.
1. Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction. Pen, pencil, keyboard.
2. Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left alone.
3. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.
4. Make your first line interesting and immediate.
5. Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up the option of finding something better. If you HAVE to say it, you will.
6. Sometimes the wrong word isn't the one you think it is but another close by.
7. When you feel finished, print it. Put a typed copy on the wall...read now and then.
8. End more than half your lives and more than 2/3 your sentences on words of one syllable.
9. Don't use the same subject in two consecutive sentences.
10. Don't overuse the verb "to be."
11. If you ask a question, don't answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer.
12. Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.
13. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.
14. Use any noun that is yours, even if it only has a local use. Don't be afraid to take emotional possession of words.
15. Beware words necessitated by grammar to make thing clear but dilute the drama of the statement. Words of temporality: meanwhile, while, as, during, and.
Words of causality: so, because, thus, causing.
Words of opposition: yet, but.
16. Beware using "so" and "such" for emphasis. Phony words when uttered.
17. When writing, assume the right of all things to be resides in the things themselves.
18. Any stance, no matter how melodramatic, is prefer to none.
19. Locate the events in your poem, with specificity.
20. Style and substance may represent a class system. The imagination is a democracy.
Found on the Naropa web site. Love these!
Allen Ginsberg's Mind Writing Slogans
"First thought is best in art, second in other matters."
--William Blake
I Ground (situation, or primary perception)
1. "First Thought, Best Thought" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
2. "Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
3. "The Mind must be loose." -John Adams
4. "One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." -Charles Olsen, "Projective Verse"
5. "My writing is a picture of the mind moving." -Phillip Whalen
6. "Surprise Mind" -Allen Ginsberg
7. "The Old pond, the frog jumps in, Kerplunk!" -Basho
8. "Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
9. "Do I contradict myself? very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman
10. "...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature?...Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" -John Keats
11. "Form is never more than an extension of content." -Robert Creely to Charles Olsen
12. "Form follows function." -Frank Loyd Wright
13. Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions -A.G.
14. "Nothing is better for being eternal Nor so white as the white that dies of a day." -Louis Zukofsky
15. Notice what you notice -A.G.
16. Catch yourself thinking -A.G
17. Observe what's vivid -A.G.
18. Vividness is self-selecting -A.G.
19. Spots of Time -William Wordsworth
20. If we don't show anyone we're free to write anything -A.G.
21. My mind is open to itself. -Gelek Rinpoche
22. Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound. -Charles Reznikoff
II Path (method or recognition)
1. "No ideas but in things."..."No ideas but in facts." -William Carlos Williams
"Close to the nose." -W.C. Williams
3. Sight is where the eye hits." -Louis Zukofsky
4. "Clamp the mind down on objects." -W.C. Wiliams
5. "Direct treatment of the thing...(or object,)" -Ezra Pound
6. "Presentation, not reference." -Ezra Pound
7. "Give me a for instance." -Vernacular
8. "Show not tell." -Vernacular
9.
"The natural object is always the adequate symbol." -Ezra Pound
10. "Things are symbols of themselves." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
11. "Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones
He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." -William Blake
12. "And being old she put a skin/ on everything she said." -W.B. Yeats
13. "Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." -Jack Kerouac
14. Details are the life of prose." -Jack Kerouac
15. Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best. -A.G.
16. "Economy of Words" -Ezra Pound
17. "Tailoring" -Gregory Corso
18. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. -A.G.
19. Syntax condensed, sound is solid. -A.G.
20. Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. -A.G.
21. "Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" -Ezra Pound
22. "...awareness...of the tone leading of the vowels." -Ezra Pound
23. "...an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters..." -Ezra Pound
24. "Lower limit speech, upper limit song" -Louis Zukofsky
25. "Phanopoela, Melopoeia, Logopoela." -Ezra Pound
26. "Sight, Sound, Intellect." -Louis Zukofsky
27. "Only emotion objectified endures." -Louis Zukofsky
III Fruition (result or appreciation)
1. Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
2. "Alone with the Alone." -Plotinus
3. Sunyata (skt.) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
4. "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" -Zen Koan
5. "What's the face you had before you were born?" -Zen Koan
6. Vipassana (skt.) = Clear Seeing
7. "Stop the world" -Carlos Casteneda
8. "The purpose of art is to stop time." -Bob Dylan
9. "The unspeakable visions of the individual." -J.K.
10. "I'm going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly." -Chuang Tzu, (Tr. Burton Watson)
11. "Candor" -Whitman
12. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." -W. Shakespeare
13. "Contact" -A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W.C. Williams, Eds.
14. "God appears & God is Light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day." -W. Blake
15. Subject is known by what she sees. -A.G.
16. Others can measure their visions by what we see. -A.G.
17. Candor ends paranoia. -A.G.
18. "Willingness to be Fool." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
19. "Day & Night / you're all right." -Gregory Corso
20. Tyger: "Humility is Beatness." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A.G.
21. Lion: "Surprise Mind" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A.G.
22. Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
23. Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
24. "To be men not destroyers" -Ezra Pound
25. "Speach synchronizes mind & body" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
26. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" -Shelley
27. "Make it new" -Ezra Pound
28. "When the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake" -Plato
29. "Every third thought shall be my grave" -W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
30. "That in black ink love may still shine bright" -W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
31. "Only emotion endures" Ezra Pound
32. "Well while I'm here I'll do the work-
and what's the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken dumbshow." -A.G.
33. "...Kindness, sweetest
of the small notes
in the world's ache,
most modest & gentle
entered man before history
and became his daily
connection, let no man
tell you otherwise." -Carl Rakosi
34. "To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." -Gelek Rinpoche
In an essay whose title I know I have somewhere, Patricia Hampl says memoir as now practiced has its roots in poetry. She writes that “...the chaotic lyric impulse, not the smooth drive of plot, is the engine of memory. Flashes of half-forgotten moments flare up from their recesses…shards glinting in the dust. These are the materials of memoir, details that refuse to stay buried, demand habitation. They may be domesticated into a story, but the passion that begat them as images belongs to the wild night of poetry.”
More unexpected connections, revelations. I feel like everything of late is steering me away from linear narrative and toward the poetic. Next week, I start the Prose Poem course through Writers on the Net as well. Interesting, after so many years struggling and frustrated with short stories and the conventions of narrative fiction in general.; Of course, that said, I really feel like I don't at all know what I'm doing with poetry. But maybe that's the point -- if you are a poet, you don't need to study or learn anything. That there's an intuitive river of sound and meter and form that runs through you and you simply need to be open to paying attention to it.
In an essay whose title I know I have somewhere, Patricia Hampl says memoir as now practiced has its roots in poetry. She writes that “...the chaotic lyric impulse, not the smooth drive of plot, is the engine of memory. Flashes of half-forgotten moments flare up from their recesses…shards glinting in the dust. These are the materials of memoir, details that refuse to stay buried, demand habitation. They may be domesticated into a story, but the passion that begat them as images belongs to the wild night of poetry.”
More unexpected connections, revelations. I feel like everything of late is steering me away from linear narrative and toward the poetic. Next week, I start the Prose Poem course through Writers on the Net as well. Interesting, after so many years struggling and frustrated with short stories and the conventions of narrative fiction in general.; Of course, that said, I really feel like I don't at all know what I'm doing with poetry. But maybe that's the point -- if you are a poet, you don't need to study or learn anything. That there's an intuitive river of sound and meter and form that runs through you and you simply need to be open to paying attention to it.
Wanted to get these down somewhere, here, as if committing them to the bits and bytes here on the pen ink river blog will make the writing real, will make me want to get up and write whatever tales are lurking behind the suggestion of these words. For now, I have them in alphabetical order. They are meant to be titles for the short prose poems? poems? writings? that make up the story of you, of you and me, of me after you.
A Free Tibet
Accept Loss Forever
And the Muse Cometh
Angel in a Porsche 922
Baby Dreams
Baptism
Bigleaf Maple Gallows
Boy Meets Girl
Brain Fevers
Broken, Irreparable, Warranty Expired
Bury the Ugly
Diaspora of Objects
Fifteen Minuets
First-person Obituary
I Remember
Inappropriate Love Objects
Into the Fire
Jukebox Manic
Lamentation
Las Vegas Lounge Singer
Madonna on Steroids
Metta Sutra
Migration of the Monarchs
Mint Tea and Camel Straights
Night of the Shooting Stars
No Business Being There
On Buzzboy's Planet
Otherwise Ordinary Days
Our Holy Moment
Parallel Lives
Phantom Limb
Pilgrimage, October 2004
Post Mortem Whiteboard
Razing the Dead
Satyrgraha
Self-wooed Strangeness
Something Else
The Accidental Puppies
The Last Good Kiss
The Milk Went Bad
The Record of Bad Times
The Shortest Distance Between Two Decembers
What I Do, This Late
When You Dressed Me
You Arrive, A Vulture
