The ideal project does not exist, each time there is the opportunity to realize an approximation.
—Paulo Mendes da Rocha
The ideal poem does not exist, each time there is the opportunity to realize an approximation.
[Mendes da Rocha quoted in The Architect Says (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), compiled and edited by Laura S. Dushkes]
1 comment:
\While I understand how the notion of an "ideal poem" can be attractive, I also think it's an illusion. The poet has an ideal; the poem is itself, in itself (as old Stanley Burnshaw would say). There is no ideal but the illusion of perfection. It's the perfection of the imperfection, the misalliance (Lowell), that makes poetry endlessly worth writing and reading. Who is the most "perfect" of poets? In the last 100 years, probably Valéry. But who would rather read Valéry than Rimbaud or Whitman? Who would prefer a Thomas Higginson version of an Emily Dickinson poem to the jagged, vision-drenched poems she bundled and tied with ribbon for posterity?
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