Adam Kirsch > Quotes

“The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.”
― Adam Kirsch

“Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.”
― Adam Kirsch

“According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great.”
― Adam Kirsch

“During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.”
― Adam Kirsch, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature

“In the American context, as we have seen, settler colonialism functions as an all-purpose explanation for capitalism, sexism, and climate change. Adding the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the mix is powerfully energizing, giving a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler colonial model must be made to fit.

This Procrustean process is never more conspicuous than when Western progresskves insist that the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the struggle to liberate Palestine are one and the same. ...
....
To make Israel fit its ideologically allotted role, theorists of settler colonialism must similarly redefine two central concepts: indigeneity and genocide.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“But there is a great difference between Fanon's bloody knives and Sartre's bloody scalpel. True decolonization movements, from the American Patriots of the 1770s to the FLN in the 1950s, used actual violence to drive out their oppressors. Intellectuals who use the language of settler colonialism to critique their own society, in contrast, have no mass movement at their back. That has been the predicament of the ideology of settler colonialism from the beginning: everyone knows that calls to "eradicate," "kill," or "cull" settlers can only be metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity.

But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it--from "emptiness" to "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide--could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic possibility rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be a perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously--especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“Theory sometimes seems to me a way of taking revenge on literature—the critic masters the text and rewrites it in his own image, instead of submitting to it and listening to what it has to say. The aggressive ungainliness of so much academic writing about literature is a sign of this—it is unliterary writing about literature, which should be a contradiction in terms.”
― Adam Kirsch

“The name America was not invented to change the identity of a place previously called Turtle Island; rather, the name Turtle Island was invented to change the identity of a place called America.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“According to the UN, the number of people living under colonial rule fell from 750 million in 1945 to 2 million in 2020.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“...but turning a myth upside-down only produces a different myth.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“Glück does not write confessionally about madness, suicide, and incest, as though these extreme experiences were a poet’s only access to reality. But she also does not reject the ideal of extremity; she merely denies that it has to be lived in order to be written about. She insists that it is not the content of experience which allows it to rise to the grandeur of myth, but the intensity the artist brings to it. If Glück is “against sincerity,” she is completely enthralled by authenticity, in just the sense that Lionel Trilling intended: an “extreme . . . exercise of personal will.” Her work is a tour de force of this kind of will.”
― Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

“It may seem paradoxical that opposing what one scholar calls "the slow violence of settler colonialism" should lead people to celebrate the quick violence of terrorism. But part of the appeal of radical ideologies, of the right and the left, is that they make violence virtuous. And October 7 marked the moment when settler colonialism emerged into public view as the watchword of a new ideology, one that is already influencing the way many Americans think about their country and the world.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“Difficulty is not, of course, a reason to reject or ignore a poem. Especially in reading the poetry of the twentieth century, one often willingly assents to Allen Tate’s statement that “poetry . . . demands both in its writing and in its reading all the intellectual power that we have.” There is a distinction, however, between the difficulty of obscurity and the difficulty of complexity. The latter emerges naturally from any attempt to capture a new feeling or idea for poetry. But with Graham, as with so many self-consciously modernist poets, the difficulty seems to fall into the first category. Her poems are obscure because they seem unfinished, because they reside in the privacy of the poet’s mind and not in the public realm where poet and reader discuss things in common. As long as Graham asks the reader to fill in her blanks and solve for her x’s, she has not realized poetry’s greatest and most enduring possibilities.”
― Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

“The courteous poet meets his ideal reader on conditions of equality. He approaches language as a medium of communication, which must be brought to a height of precision and eloquence in order to move and delight that reader. Concretely, this means that the courteous poet will try to make clear the subject or argument of the poem, its basic grammar and concepts. Reference and allusion will be used to deepen understanding, on the assumption that reader and writer share a common literary tradition. Formally, such a poet will naturally gravitate toward meter and rhyme, which knit the poem to the traditions of English verse and provide a pattern to guide the reader’s expectations. All this emphatically does not mean that the experience the courteous poet offers will be inoffensively pleasant. It means simply that the poet’s knowledge—even of extremity, perplexity, and tragedy—will be made available to the reader, so that it can be genuinely shared.

For the discourteous poet, by contrast, novelty and complexity are the fundamental values, both because they provide aesthetic pleasure and because they differentiate the poet from his predecessors. The reader does not need to be invited or seduced into the poem; his presence is either assumed or ignored. As a result, no effort is made to avoid confusion about the subject or argument of the poem; on the contrary, it is welcomed. The finished poem will not disclose the event or emotion that brought it into being, finding it more valuable to demonstrate the incommunicability of experience. Reference and allusion tend to be idiosyncratic and alienating, and form is conceived intellectually and theoretically rather than discursively or musically.”
― Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

“Another way of expressing this difference between history and settler colonial studies is that the former is primarily interested in the past, while the latter is primarily interested in using a story about the past to change the present. And for that purpose, it's necessary to make the past as morally legible as possible. One way of accomplishing this is to describe the violence of white settlers against Natives while omitting any mention of the violence deployed by Natives resisting settler expansion.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.”
― Adam Kirsch, Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas

“Today, the poetics of authenticity is securely established. There have been isolated dissents from it, but no comprehensive rejection. Yet it should be clear by now that this poetics has thoroughly failed. It has made it more difficult for poets to produce major work, and its critical legacy is remarkable only for intellectual crudity and rhetorical violence. The sound of the critical madhouse is a thousand utterly authentic voices, all talking at once.”
― Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry

“Drakulić titled her book “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” after Arendt’s description of a typical Nazi functionary who “does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.”
― Adam Kirsch

“You shall love the Lord your God . . . with all your might,” the Tsenerene interprets to mean “with all your resources”: “You should love God with your money. Your money should not be more beloved to you than a mitzvah.” It goes on to tell the story”
― Adam Kirsch, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature

“To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a “good war,” and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat. The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past.”
― Adam Kirsch