The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. (Hill and Wang; Reissue edition April 1, 1977) Originally published 1953,
Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory. — Roland Barthes,… Continue reading Roland Barthes
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants.… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels… Continue reading Walter Benjamin
We think not in words but in shadows of words. — Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (McGraw-Hill, 1973)
I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, … so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately. — Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From… Continue reading Jacques Derrida
The poet is buried in the obliterated whiteness beneath the dark letters of a poem. — Jennifer Moxley, “Fragments of a Broken Poetics,” Chicago Review, Spring 2010
Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. — Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Graywolf Press, 2010)
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. — T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Routledge, 1989)
The Vale of Soul-Making 