Peter Prokopiev > Recent Status Updates

A poet who knows what it is he 'wants to say' may be sure it's been said already.
Hugh Kenner, from "A Sinking Island"

'Travaillons,' Cezanne would say, when visitors wanted to talk aesthetics.
Frederic Raphael

More and more I feel bent against the modern English habit of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud, instead of making anything.
Matthew Arnold

To look is to forget the name of the things you are seeing.
Paul Valery

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P. D. James from A Taste for Death

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot

Get along, says our DNA, talk to each other, figure out the world, be useful, and above all keep an eye out for affection.
Lewis Thomas, M.D.

Sonny boy, it's all real — so watch out!
The Town Drunk of Tarboro, North Carolina

It is very difficult to stop feeling.
Raymond Moore

... it seems as if I’ve been doing the same things since I was six years old. I’m a few inches taller and I have a graying beard, but otherwise there’s not much difference.
Maurice Sendak

Few people have the imagination for reality.
Goethe

It’s nothing that a guy should take all of his emotions, his prayers and meditations into a night club, and torture the people with their torments by playing everything they feel. It would be better sometimes to play some things they imagine to be true, outside their own personal lives.
Charles Mingus

The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas Merton

I think I am beginning to understand something of it.
Renoir's last words

The food of the soul is Light and Space.
Herman Melville

I am that he whose brains are scattered endlessly.
William Carlos Williams

”I sigh to be a poet.” We groan to be editors at such moments.”

”People rarely translate poetry for pleasure, especially when it comes to someone as difficult as Goethe. The translator must not only stay faithful to the text. He or she should also reveal the poem’s full beauty while retaining its form and suggesting the epoch’s style and spirit. In your version, Goethe becomes a writer whose odds of achieving world glory are slim.”

”Trips abroad? We sincerely hope you’ll take them, they sometimes come in handy. But before you head off to Capri, we suggest a trip to Lesser Wółka. If you come back with nothing to write about, then no azure grottoes will save you.”

I wonder if it isn’t discouraging to new readers to start the book with the Discreet Series?

Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky.
I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies with my eyes pouring into the dark.
Fumbling
and slowly
consciousness replaces the bars.
Dreamtails and angry liquids
swim back down to the middle of me.
It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.

Four naked alder trunks rise straight up from it and sway in the blue air. Each trunk
where it enters the ice radiates a map of silver pressures-thousands of hair-thin cracks catching the white of the light like a jailed face
catching grins through the bars.

But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk
I have reached the middle
where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy
water.
It is frozen.
A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.
Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black.

Mornings when I meditated
I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul, not the complex mysteries of love and hate.
But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight.

Kitchen is quiet as a bone when I come in.
No sound from the rest of the house.
I wait a moment then open the fridge.
Brilliant as a spaceship it exhales cold confusion.

It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass.
Now and then a remark trails through the glass.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape
…
Time in its transparent loops as it passes beneath me now still carries the sound of the telephone in that room
…

From the first 10 pages:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream
…
Spring opens like a blade there.
…
The bare trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light
…

After all the heart is not a small stone to be rolled this way and that.
The mind is not a box
to be shut fast.
And yet it is!
It is!