Jean Bowen

“It seems to me what that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysterious. The problem is to make a whole that does not foreit this power.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“I read quickly, flitting and sipping, skipping the boring bits and seizing on the oddities and inconsistencies which are often ignored by the scholars since they interfere with the measured and coherent approach to the matter at hand.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring

“This is a worrying recipe. Young bears (cubs will need about two and a half hours of cooking) might well still be attended by their mothers, who are notoriously irritable when anything threatens their offspring. Choose, rather, an old friendless bear and double the cooking time.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment- the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.
That's my sense of the poem's beginning. What follows is a period of more concentrated work, so called because as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still, this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And then the poem is finished, and at the moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet's agency. And the poet, from that point, isn't a poet anymore, simple someone who wishes to be one.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry