Marije de Wit

“You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate
the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries-

-Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in
this world, and the next worlds.

This is about getting to know each other”
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

“Writing a poem, I
construct a magenta fan
with a photolikeness, enclosed in a central oval,
of a beloved relation,
with her hair brown
that is not to say, before her hair turned grey:
it's her essential self.

Someone's jealous of the attention
I'm paying her in my work
because he wants it all for his art
which is a pure, gridded, layer of words
painted in crosshatched grey monochrome brushstrokes.
Your art, he seems to say to me, kisses life's ass.
His art asks that his own ass be kissed.”
― Alice Notley, Disobedience

“By formally addressing itself to the infinite without the infinite receding into a definitionless void, poetry establishes a conceptual interface between the two terms. It creates the possibility of encounter with the unknown and the other by demonstrating this interface as essential to, and indeed constitutive of, individual human being.”
― Johanna Skibsrud, The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature and Being

“For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a memory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.”
― Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art