A Poet Reflects

On the road in the long darkness.  My wristwatch
gleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect.

The quiet in the crowded compartment is dense.
In the darkness the meadows stream past.

But the writer is halfway into his image, there
he travels, at the same time eagle and mole.

—Tomas Tranströmer, from section V of “The Journey’s Formulae” in The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton (New Directions, 2006)

“Two ways of creating: To uncover what is already there or to make something entirely new.  My problem is that I believe in both.”

—Charles Simic, from section III of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.  The solution is to become one’s language. You cannot write a poem until you hit upon its rhythm.  That rhythm not only belongs to the subject matter, it belongs to your interior world, and the moment they hook up there’s a quantum leap of energy. You can ride on that rhythm, it will carry you somewhere strange. The next morning you look at the page and wonder how it all happened. You have to triumph over all your diurnal glibness and cheapness and defensiveness.”

—Stanley Kunitz, from “On Inspiration” in The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton (Viking, 1989)

hsaptus:

“The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.”

—Charles Bukowski (via flowence)

(Source: rabbitinthemoon)

synestheticdictionary:

“I used to want to make poems as though poetry or even speech hadn’t existed before me. Now I work at the other end of the spectrum, making poems mostly out of what already exists, and somehow finding that fresher. More mysterious.”

—Peter Cole, from “The Invention of Influence: A Notebook,” in Poetry. (via ecantwell)

“Here is a fairly sober version of what happens in the small room between the writer and the work itself.  It is similar to what happens between a painter and the canvas.

First you shape the vision of what the projected work of art will be.  The vision, I stress, is no marvelous thing: it is the work’s intellectual structure and aesthetic surface.  It is a chip of mind, a pleasing intellectual object.  It is a vision of the work, not of the world.  It is a glowing thing, a blurred thing of beauty.  Its structure is at once luminous and translucent; you can see the world through it.  After you receive the initial charge of this imaginary object, you add to it at once several aspects, and incubate it most gingerly as it grows into itself.

Many aspects of the work are still uncertain, of course; you know that.  You know that if you proceed you will change things and learn things, that the form will grow under your hands and develop new and richer lights.  But that change will not alter the vision of its deep structures; it will only enrich it.  You know that, and you are right.

But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you are filling in the vision.  You cannot fill in the vision.  You cannot even bring the vision to light,  You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page.  The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.  The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten.  It has be replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.”

—Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989)

galaxies-awayfromtheir-standards:

[P]oems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. [P]oems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain.

—Dorothea Lasky, a slight variation on the quotation, Poetry is Not a Project (via nps2013)

“Art is an activity in which the actual feel of doing it must be your guide; hence the need for confidence, courage, independence.  And hence the need for guardedness about learning too well the craft of doing it.”

—William Stafford, from “Soul Food” in Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation, edited by Paul Merchant and Vicent Wixon (The University of Michigan Press, 1997)