“More and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language.”
—Christian Wiman, from “Fugitive Pieces (I)” in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
(Source: furtherfromage, via timetofeedthealien)
It’s all I have to bring today —
This, and my heart beside —
This, and my heart, and all the fields —
And all the meadows wide —
Be sure you count — should I forget
Some one the sum could tell —
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
—Emily Dickinson
“On one level metaphor is naming, however provisional and temporary the name is. Metaphor has interested me more as a way of knowledge, a way of grasping something. I like to take a metaphor and look at it, then do something like what I do with idiomatic expressions—discover a kind of mythic structure, use the metaphor as a way to discover something about the nature of reality.
You have to accept the metaphor’s premises and follow its logic. Take the expression, “a bladeless knife with a handle,” where you have a figurative proposition which doesn’t mean anything. Yet by simply saying the expression, it exists somehow. Looking at the expression, you realize it is possible to construct a poem around it, but a poem that would follow the logic of a world where there are bladeless knives without handles. You couldn’t have ordinary tables and chairs around it. The other objects would have to have some distortion to accommodate themselves to that new world.
So the poem becomes a statement about a kind of reality with a logic of its own. That little cosmos is there and yet it isn’t. It almost seems to cancel itself. That brings us back to Heidegger and the suspicion of utterance. You really can say anything and make it exist; existence is saying, speaking.”
—Charles Simic, from The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 1988).
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.Catherine Wing, The Darker Sooner
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
steve roggenbuck:
hazel, i dotn care about poetry and i dont care about being good at it, i just want to make people happy. from my understanding of life, i think that’s a good goal , but im sorry if i’ve made you upset by takeing attention away from people who care about good poetry in…
Whelp…now that’s something to think about.
“…a lady just walked by wiggling it…and we are not dead yet.” –
Charles Bukowski, letter for employment
JENNY HENDRIX
on the afterlife of Tintin.
2011 — All Rights Reserved.
On March 3rd, 1983, the French daily Libération ran under an unusual cover: against a black background, as though seen through a telescope, a circular drawing portrayed a cowlicked boy lying face down in the snow while a white fox terrier keened brokenly beside him. Tintin est Mort! tolled the headline. It was in fact Hergé, the Belgian-born creator of the tufty-haired hero, who had departed the day prior, but the headline of that issue — in which Libération replaced every illustration, including those for political news, TV listings, weather reports, and even ads, with drawings from Hergé’s canon — indicated the extent to which the man had become enmeshed with his famous creation. For the French-speaking world, it may as well have been Tintin who’d died, rather than the man who, despite valuing lightness, clarity, and humor above all, was never nearly so clear and precise in his politics as he was in his art. Hergé’s style, to bowdlerize Roland Barthes, might be called biographical: he and Tintin are linked by this very tension between truth and simplicity.
The Tintin stories — published in 1929 in the right-leaning Catholic newspaper Le Petit Vingtieme, then later in Herge’s own Journal Tintin and the series of Casterman albums through which we know them now — are celebrated for what the Dutch artist Joost Swarte, writing in 1977, dubbed Hergé’s ligne claire, or “clear line,” style. In his use of uniform, strong lines, flat, saturated color, and clearly delineated shapes and volumes, Hergé negotiates between the techniques of his era’s naturalistic adult adventure comics like Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and those of gag-based newspaper strips like Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff. While his characters are cartoonishly simple, his backgrounds — from the gorgeous Byzantine murals in King Muskar’s palace to the white voids of Tibet — are lush and rigorously detailed. The scenery in a Tintin comic is never static; it moves and turns and anchors the characters in space and, thanks to Hergé’s use of different angles and zooms, in time and mood as well. Large elaborate “silent” panels — set even in the heart of action — enrich the story and give it room to breathe. The comics theorist Scott McCloud, in his graphic nonfiction treatise Understanding Comics, suggests that this complexity, in combination with the characters’ simplified faces, produces multiple levels of realism that “allow readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world.” Hergé’s use of setting and his exacting depiction of movement — in which Tintin and his friends seem to rush from one panel to the next and yet remain grounded, their feet resting on a panel’s lower frame — presses composition into the service of legibility.
The “clear line” style also enables Hergé to handle serious subjects with an exquisite lightness: a technique appealing to some, exasperatingly old-fashioned to others. Unsurprisingly, Tintin has come to epitomize not only children’s adventure comics as a genre but also a kind of halcyon European colonial past. The earliest Tintin stories — Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo — are catalogs of anti-Bolshevik and colonialist pieties respectively. Likewise, Hergé’s early ethnographic efforts were based not on evidence but entirely on popular prejudice. His racist depictions of, say, Native Americans and the Congolese “Babaorum” tribe were perhaps a knee-jerk adoption to the attitudes of the time, but in prejudice, Hergé also found the kind of uncomplicated understanding of the world he sought to put forward graphically.
(Source: lareviewofbooks)
A penknife engraved first your name, then his, then a heart
around them with a wedded plus, then an X across it all—
the drawn out chronicle of your last uncontested crush
still knuckling over twenty years later in the backyard
of your parents’ house. For as I learned this evening,
it was your crossed heart that broke, not his, and so made
romance into something fleshed, impregnable, and almost
shameless once those first taboos took a backseat to
the round chord your plucked body struck: that overjoyyou’ve rung so many times by now you’ve grown unsure
of what it was you wanted then, before the dream had wearied
of itself, and sex stood through you like an ampersand. And so,
tonight, as you rise from your canopied childhood bed, I watch
you watch those leafy shadows worry across the windowsill,
and feel for a moment the presence of that lost thing out there
in the lull of a late rain dying out, in the moon transfusing
through the breathed-on pane. And I relive it again,
those thousand kisses you set upon the lips of other men.-Sherod Santos
Now that’s what I’m talking about…
A Rolling Stone rejection letter penned by Hunter S. Thompson.
(via powells)
How do you know if your writing bad poetry? Sophia Ypalatar has created an exclusive Your Poem Sucks guide.
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” —Sylvia Plath
