Don Paterson > Quotes

“A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end.”
― Don Paterson

“I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I'll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis.”
― Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

“Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.”
― Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

“While you spoke, it reached into the room 
switching off the mirrors in their frames 
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept”
― Don Paterson, Rain

“Fate's book, but my italics.”
― Don Paterson

“Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot... He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar... He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”
― Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

“Falling and flying are near identical sensations, in all but one final detail.”
― Don Paterson

“After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again.”
― Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

“Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity.”
― Don Paterson

“Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.”
― Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

“Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which feels to them quite miraculous, being their sex-dream come true.”
― Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice

“...it's perhaps time to admit that our perennial call to "work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation" has become something of an empty shibboleth. The petty, tribal, precriptive, censorious, identity-obsessed and philistine culture the SNP have created has left many older centrist heids reluctant to speak up over matters of simple common sense and public concern, conceding many of them not just to the right (with whom they are now occasionally driven to make common cause), but - far more dangerously - to the self-declared racists, sexists, homophobes and fascists who should represent our common enemy. The SNP are also, in their current incarnation, poor stewards of the independence dream. As we enter a pre-war era of economic uncertainty and shifting alliances, rediscovering it will be a far more sober and adult task than we have previously had to face. We first must decide what it is we mean by "better nation". It will have to be one with considerably more courage, genuine inclusivity and stomach for honest and civil debate than we currently demonstrate. It will require us to tackle the kinds of broad disadvantage that animate the electorate, as well as those narrow causes which excite our political and institutional leaders. It will require an Enlightenment-style revival of an artistic and intellectual meritocracy, one which can actively connect and draw on the talents of an increasingly diverse but distinctively Scottish society.”
― Don Paterson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice.”
― Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

“We may have to bring along our Unionist friends by considering less radical, federal solutions on the longer road to full independence. The movement has been derailed by many other things besides identity politics: cowardice, personality cult, unwise alliances, middle-management over-reach, a bureaucratic, form-obsessed culture of mutual distrust, self-imposed busy-work, Holyrood bubbles and Westminster troughers. It will be righted on its tracks as soon as we can remember that we can also build movements without the politicians and institutions that currently divide us through increasingly morbid and inward-looking agendas. Until they can be trusted to represent us again, it may be time for artists to wean themselves off institutional support, at least where they can, through the direct engagement of audiences, readers and students that the digital age offers, and through private sponsorship and investment.”
― Don Paterson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the tontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow”
― Don Paterson, Landing Light. Poems

“Two Trees'

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Don Miguel's patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.”
― Don Paterson

“The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.”
― Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

“My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run

in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.

The shake’s as old as he is, all
(thank god) his body can recall
of the hour when, one inch from home,
we couldn’t get the air to him;

and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.

But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark

and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim -
our will and nature’s are the same;

we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong -

so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can’t help but broadcast it:

look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything.”
― Don Paterson, Rain

“forget the ink, the milk, the blood -
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain's own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.”
― Don Paterson, Rain