Wise words

 

Thoughts on Art from creative people born May 9:

from Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset (“I am I, and my circumstance”) (España invertebrada, La rebelión de las masas) (1883-1955):

The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

The poet begins where the man ends. / The man's lot is to live his human life, / the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

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from American author and illustrator of children’s books William Pène du Bois (The Twenty-One Balloons, Bear Party, Lion); co-founded The Paris Review (1916-1993):

Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.

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from English Tony-winning dramatist Alan Bennett (Beyond the Fringe, The History Boys); also noted for A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears, Single Spies, The Madness of George III, Talking Heads, The Lady in the Van (b. 1934):

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

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from Serbian American Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Laureate Charles Simic (The World Doesn't End); also noted for Selected Poems 1963-1983, Unending Blues (b. 1938):

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

There's no preparation for poetry.

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which / the entire organism participates.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994); also noted for The End of Beauty, Sea Change, P L A C E, From the New World: Selected Poems 1976-2014, Fast, Runaway (b. 1950):

What poetry can, must, and always will do for us: it complicates us, it doesn't soothe.

The primary function of the creative use of language—in our age—is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it. Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.