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I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

The Believer Logger: Interview with Rebecca Lindenberg

#quote #poetry #the unsayable #the hole in the donut #dark matter

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too', the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

Anne Carson (1998). Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press; p. 30.

#Anne Carson #Eros the Bittersweet #eros #love #desire #absence

Without the vanishing point looming large somewhere over there, shiny bright with its concomitant reminder that all of my imaginary lines of flight are bound to converge in a catastrophic disappearance of the real, there would be no anticipated endgame triggering my immediate need to make art.

Mark Amerika (2007). Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics. Cambridge: The MIT Press; p. 8.

#Mark Amerika #Meta/Data #digital poetics #the vanishing point #nihilism #art #poetry #literary theory

A ‘desiring machine’ opposes the notion of unity or oneness: the elements or discontinuities that compose it do not belong to either an original totality that has been lost or one which finalizes or completes it, a telos … Desire does not create permanent multiplicities; it experiments, producing ever-new alignments, linkages, and connections, making things. It is fundamentally nomadic not teleological, meandering, creative, nonrepetitive, proliferative, unpredictable.

Elizabeth Grosz (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; p. 168.

#Elizabeth Grosz #Volatile Bodies #re. Deleuze and Guattari #desiring machine #nomadology

“The context of networked and programmable media from which electronic literature springs is part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they construct themselves as contemporary subjects.”

N. Katherine Hayles (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press; p. 87.

#N. Katherine Hayles #Electronic Literature #digital subjectivity

"[The rhizome is] an attempt to make connections between widely different spaces without imposing hierarchy."

Mario Vrbančić (2005). 'Burroughs's Phantasmic Maps' in New Literary History, vol. 36, no. 2; p. 313.

#Mario Vrbančić #Burroughs's Phantasmic Maps #rhizome #hierarchy #re. Deleuze and Guattari

Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell.

Joseph Campbell (1973). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press; p. 121.

#Joseph Campbell #The Hero with a Thousand Faces

More strongly than any of the other arts, we feel in literature a revolt against historical time, the desire to attain to other temporal rhythms than that in which we are condemned to live and work.

Mircea Eliade (1975). Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row; p. 192.

#Mircea Eliade #Myth and Reality

If the elite revel in Finnegan's Wake, or in atonal music, or in tachisme, it is ... because such works represent closed worlds, hermetic universes that cannot be entered except by overcoming immense difficulties, like the initiatory ordeals of the archaic and traditional societies.

Mircea Eliade (1975). Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row; p. 188.

#Mircea Eliade #Myth and Reality

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).

Joseph Campbell (1968). The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press; p. 28.

#Joseph Campbell #Hero with a Thousand Faces

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized.

Mircea Eliade (1978). Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row; p. 187.

#Mircea Eliade #Myth and Reality

The impressions that arise as a result of this process will vary from individual to individual, but only within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the unwritten text. In the same way, two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of the plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The 'stars' in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable.

Wolfgang Iser (1972). 'The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach' in New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 2; p. 287.

#Wolfgang Iser #The Reading Process

Writing, no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled.

Italo Calvino (1994). 'La Poubelle Agréée' in The Road to San Giovanni, trans. by Tim Parks. London: Vintage/Random House; p. 125.

#Italo Calvino #La Poubelle Agreee

Since poetry uses words more for their sounds than for the concepts joined to them, the concepts' authority is weakened. The veil they cast over reality is torn or at least work thin. Contact is reestablished with presence.

Yves Bonnefoy (2002). 'At Stake: Poetry in the Western World', trans. by James Petterson, in Common Knowledge, vol. 8, no. 3; p. 599

#Yves Bonnefoy #At Stake

... I believe that poetry can most strictly and fundamentally be defined as a remembering, within discourse, of the presence that discourse abolishes. Our speech is carried along the endless flow of representations and meanings. It is poetry, at the root of speech, that remembers situations and moments lived in the immediate presence of things or persons--an immanence that discloses the infinite.

Yves Bonnefoy (2002). 'At Stake: Poetry in the Western World', trans. by James Petterson, in Common Knowledge, vol. 8, no. 3; p. 598

#Yves Bonnefoy #At Stake

What a discovery!--to see, to think, to differentiate the universe, to sense its true configuration, is, in the same instant, because we speak, to lose it.

Yves Bonnefoy (1977). 'The Poetics of Mallarmé' trans. by Elaine Ancekewicz, in Yale French Studies, no. 54; p. 12

#Yves Bonnefoy #The Poetics of Mallarme

When a phenomenon appears it gives both itself and its image: the writer seeks what presents itself but can only grasp its image. Nothing substantial, this image is being that has been deprived of being; it has no abode, and merely indicates a non-realm in which there is nothing but the ceaseless and pointless circulation of images. In that space of withdrawal, there is only language without the light of consciousness to direct it, and it murmurs of its own accord, becoming the speech of no one. Blanchot calls this eerie space the Outside, the Neutral, the Imaginary, or the Impossible; and the writer who reduces the distance between his or her voice and its eternal murmur is the one who draws close to saying everything.

Kevin Hart (2004). 'The Right to Say Everything', from: The European Legacy, vol. 9, no. 1; pp. 9-10

#Kevin Hart #The Right to Say Everything

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