Telemachy

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"You will drown for poems," a film collaboration with dancer, Julie Ann Minaai, and Garrett and Garrett commissioned for the 2015 Dance Film Festival UK

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"Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn," Ai Weiwei (1995)

[jslr]

If poetry demands solitude and introspection, then I am in trouble. I know too many gifted poets who have been waiting for years for time to write. This saddens me. I believe poetry benefits from introspection, but solitude — physical solitude — is not necessary for introspection. The secret is to have the capacity for introspection while being around others. I remember hearing Lucille Clifton suggesting to a group of poets that wondered how she managed to keep writing while having her share of children, that they look at the length of her poems during the years she spent raising the kids. They were shorter, she said. Her point was that she was not going to stop writing. But she was going to change the way she wrote — the form, if you will — to suit the culture of her world. It is a most brilliant thing. Recently, my children were laughing about the fact that they have never really seen me write. Suddenly there is a book and then they wonder how that happened, when did I do all that writing. The answer is that I worked on the poems while I was with them. Introspection — thinking, if you will — happens in the head. Chew, and walk, chew and walk, now rub your belly and pat the head. Again, chew and walk, chew and walk, now rub the belly and pat the head.

Kwame Dawes, quoted in "The Electric Poetry of Kwame Dawes" by Diriye Osman (via jslr)

[telemachy]

...the more specific you are, the more general it'll be. You really have to face that thing. And there are certain evasions, certain nicenesses that I think you have to get out of. The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we're not normally subject to [and that] has to do with not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like.

Diane Arbus, from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

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José Garcia Villa and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in NYC, Feb. 1959; photo: Fred W. McDarrah

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Reliquaria is available now from U. Nebraska Press, Amazon, Waterstones, and your local independent bookseller.

[telemachy]

Untitled by Mariuo Cresci (1979)

[mttbll]

Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other. Part of the force field, the charge, is the working history of the words themselves, how someone has known them, used them, doubted and relied on them in a life. Part of the movement among the words belongs to sound—the guttural, the liquid, the choppy, the drawn-out, the breathy, the visceral, the downlight. The theater of any poem is a collection of decisions about space and time—how are these words to lie on the page, with what pauses, what headlong motion, what phrasing, how can they meet the breath of the someone who comes along to read them? And in part the field is charged by the way images swim into the brain through written language: swan, kettle, icicle, ashes, scab, tamarack, tractor, veil, slime, teeth, freckle.

Adrienne Rich [via mttbll]

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from Gillian Wearing's "Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say” (1992-93).

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Maya Angelou in conversation with Dave Chappelle

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At Kara Walker's “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014), children playing

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From Photography & Power in the Colonial Philippines: Colonial officials went to great lengths to teach Filipinos Western athletic games, such as this foot race with an American flag (on left) at the finish line. At the same time, they suppressed Philippine popular sports.

[telemachy]

There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.

from William Carlos Williams' introduction to The Wedge (1944)

[telemachy]

But the ice on Ellesmere Island at the heart of Nunavut is melting and polar bears are in trouble, for their hunting is dependent on summer ice, and chemical contamination is turning some of them into hermaphrodites. There are no words in the native languages for the new birds arriving in the warming far north. Chunks of Antarctic ice shelf the size of small New England states are falling into the sea, which is rising enough to threaten the very existence of some of the small islands in the world and the cultures of those islands...There are nightmarish things at large, and it is not my purpose to deny them. What are the grounds of hope in this world of wrecks?

from "Doubt" by Rebecca Solnit

[telemachy]

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

from "Berryman," W.S. Merwin

[telemachy]

Rhythmic form and subject-matter are locked in a permanent embrace: …in metrical verse, it is the nature of the control being exercised that becomes part of the life being spoken about. It is poetry making great use of the conscious intelligence, but its danger is bombast—the controlling music drowning out everything else. Free verse invites a different style of experience, improvisation. Its danger lies in being too relaxed, too lacking in controlling energy.

from The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography by Thom Gunn

[telemachy]

32. There is a small part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is crucial for recognizing faces. If you lose this ability your deficit is called prosopagnosia. It happens that a person with brain damage looks at herself in the mirror, and believes she is seeing, not herself, but a double. It seems that what has vanished is not reason, but that special feeling we get when we look at our reflections, that warm sense of ownership. When that disappears, the image of one’s self becomes alien.

from "Notes on Seeing" by Siri Hustvedt