“The idea of dystopian bleakness that could only be redeemed by creative fantasy resonated with me at a deep, personal level…I had always relied on my imagination and creativity to see me through the lowest points, the darkest days of childhood, and later at school, art college and the early days of The Who. I had come to rely on this mechanism to fly me out of danger and depression, like the air-sea rescue of a drowning man.”
–Pete Townshend
found in Who I Am
“The physician and the poet can both be healers. They share a common goal in their efforts to maintain light and order against the chaos of darkness and disease, and to create or restore the beauty and harmony of health: in this quest, medicine serves the body, poetry the spirit.”
–A.H. Jones
from “Literature and Medicine”
“…no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”
– David Foster Wallace
–found in Infinite Jest
“I have to reiterate — on the of chance that someone, while leafng backwards, happens to open the book to this page. Don’t read me. He who writes in blood wishes to be learned by heart, rather than read. I spit upon leisured readers. You might as well go and watch TV.”
–Revolt Pimenov
found in “Why Did Free Verse Catch on in the West, but not in Russia? On the Social Uses of Memorized Poetry” by Mikhail Gronas
“Poetry couples the making of the biggest mistakes possible with the making of the fewest and probably the loveliest. Of course, philosophy, the entire discipline, stands as the biggest, and conceivably the best, mistake of poetry.”
–Madeline Gins
found in Helen Keller or Arakawa
“Each art, as is natural, has a distinct mode and form of Duende, but their roots unite at the point from which flow the dark sounds of Manuel Torre, the ultimate matter, and uncontrollable mutual depth and extremity of wood, sound, canvas, word.
Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have raised three arches and with clumsy hands placed within them the Muse, the angel and the Duende.
The Muse remains motionless: she can have a finely pleated tunic or cow eyes like those which gaze out in Pompeii, at the four-sided nose her great friend Picasso has painted her with. The angel can disturb Antonello da Messina’s heads of hair, Lippi’s tunics, or the violins of Masolino or Rousseau.
The Duende… Where is the Duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.”
–García Lorca
from “Theory and Play of the Duende“
“…each one ought to take up a subject of such weight as to be a fair burden for his own shoulders, so that their strength may not be too heavily taxed and he be forced to tumble into the mud. This is the advice our master Horace gives us when he says, in the beginning of his Art of Poetry, ‘Ye who write, take up a subject suited to your strength.’”
–Dante (as quoted by James Wright)
found in The New Naked Poetry
“Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.”
–from “Song of Myself” (Walt Whitman)
“Si vis me flere, dolendum est
primum ipsi tibi.”
“If you wish me to weep, you yourself
must first feel grief.”
–from “Ars Poetica” (Horace)
“A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.”
–from “Ars Poetica” (Archibald MacLeish)
