The posts from now until the new book drops in May will be—in
old anthropology lingo--participant
observation, with me as the participant observing this crazy little thing
called life. And I’ll go meta---I’ll write about writing, directly and through
analogy; for example, I take and I juxtapose something such as the sculptor
Anthony Caro talking about combining pieces of metal to create a work of art,
comparing the process to using notes in composing music: “Just as a succession of these make up a
melody or a sonata, so I take anonymous units and try to make them cohere in an
open way into a sculptural whole.” And then I compare that process to my
writing, the random words and phrases in my pieces being the same as the
“notes” and the “anonymous units” in Caro’s statement. Voila! Writing about writing.
But to kick things off, here are excerpts and quotes from,
and about, a random group of artists, writers, and religious leaders, people I
call The Real McCoys. So put your hands together for: Helen Frankenthaler, Emily Dickinson, Fernando
Pessoa, W.H. Auden, Mary Baker Eddy, Jesus Christ, Sonny Greer, Robert Olson,
Virginia Woolf, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Gertrude Stein, William Blake
and Samuel Beckett.
Helen Frankenthaler
A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once.
Emily Dickinson
A
route of evanescence
With
a revolving wheel;
A
resonance of emerald,
A
rush of cochineal;
And
every blossom on the bush
Adjusts
its tumbled head,---
The
mail from Tunis, probably,
An
easy morning’s ride.
Fernando
Pessoa
The
ports with their unmoving ships,
Intensely
unmoving ships,
And
small boats close by, waiting…
W.H.
Auden
Far
off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge
on urgent voluntary errands,
And
this full view
Indeed
may enter
And
move in memory as now these clouds do,
That
pass the harbor mirror
And
all the summer through the water saunter.
Mary Baker Eddy
And o'er earth's troubled, angry sea
I see Christ walk,
And come to me, and tenderly,
Divinely talk.
Sonny
Greer
Cast
your bread upon the waters and it comes back buttered toast.
Charles Olson
INTERVIEWER: Why have you
chosen poetry as a medium of artistic creation?
OLSON: I think I made a
hell of a mistake.
Virginia
Woolf
[Chaucer],
it seems, has some art by which the most ordinary words and the simplest
feelings when laid side by side make each other shine.
[Jane
Austen], too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one
slip means death…She stimulates us to supply what is not there…something that
expands iin the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life
scenes which are outwardly trivial.
Gertrude
Stein
A
tree is not lonesome just because its leaves aren’t bright.
William
Blake
- The road of excess leads to
the palace of wisdom.
- You never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough.
- Exuberance is Beauty.
Samuel
Beckett
I
never considered the loss of consciousness that great a loss.