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“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.”
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
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.”
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
“I'm attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied. . .”
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
“We were all heroes in the end.”
― Supernova
― Supernova
“Her death was not my experience, but her absence was.”
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner
“Night Song” suggests that the oblivion we ultimately achieve is an outpost of solitude from which the other is exiled—your oblivion is not mine, as your dream is not. This last line makes a mockery of placation; it damns the wish it grants. Against the relentless pronoun, the verbs are drumbeats, infantile, primitive. If what we want is oblivion, we are all lucky.”
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner
― Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner
Dr G’s 2025 Year in Books
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