different reasons

Philosophers and poets are fond of the aphorism for different reasons.

head turning sentence

An aphorism should turn a head.

blood to poem

Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.

—Yannis Ritsos, Monochords (Tavern Books, 2017), translated by Paul Merchant.

three polish aphorisms

I had so much joy in my creations that there cannot be a question of merit.
—Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935)

Tell me what books you have at home; I’ll tell you who you are.
—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980)

Beyond each corner a number of new directions lie in wait.
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

[Beyond each line-break a number of new directions lie in wait.]

A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms (Polish Heritage Publications, 1997) compiled and translated by Jacek Galazka

floating aphorism

Each line of the poem threatened to float off as aphorism dissipating in the atmosphere.

advantage poet

Philosophers and poets are both familiar with the power of the aphorism. Poets have an advantage because they’re not worried about justifying their assertions.

like a burr

An aphorism
should be
like a burr:
sting,
stick,
and leave
a little soreness
afterwards.

—Irving Layton, "Aphs," The Whole Bloody Bird: Obs, Aphs & Pomes (1969)

well said newly seen

An aphorism shouldn’t be (as Pope put it) ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express'd’; for however ‘well expressed’, it will not move us unless the words convey a novel way of seeing an important aspect of the world or our existence.

literary collaborators

A manifesto makes room for the aphorism. The aphorism is made for a manifesto.

no system

Nietzsche is the one modern philosopher whom the layman has a fair chance of understanding. Perhaps that makes him not a philosopher. Perhaps it makes him a poet. (A non sequitur.) Or is there a connection in this sphere between being understandable and being insane?

Commenting on the unresolved contradictions in Nietzsche’s writing, H.G. Schenk describes what he has left us as ‘the intellectual echo of the recurrent oscillations of his soul, observed with utmost sensitivity’. In introducing Human, All Too Human in R.J. Hollingdale’s translation, Erich Heller remarks that even the most impressive philosophical systems is perched uncomfortably on a throne of rock-bottom stupidity, the self-induced narrow-mindedness which leads man to believe that he, a small part of an immense world, is capable of making absolutely coherent sense of it all. Heller is championing aphorisms, which, through their brevity, achieve ‘a kind’ of finality, one which we know, the world being so immense, isn’t more than a kind of. One effect of eluding narrow-mindedness and resisting schematization, something more commonly observed in poets…

—D. J. Enright, Interplay: a kind of commonplace book (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

poems distilled

15
Memory is the purest form of imagination.
(Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”)

45

Anyone can be a gun, but it takes a poet to go off half-cocked.
(Dickinson, 768)

169

Finding a poem in a blank page is like finding a snowman in flakes still falling from the sky.
(Stevens, “The Snow Man”)

321

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.
(Ginsberg, “Howl”)

454

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

(L. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again")

464

Sometimes we have to die many times to figure out how we want to live.
(Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)

—George Murray, Quick (ECW Press, 2017)

found incomplete

There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets! They don’t seek the ideal in complicated things—they find it in the incomplete.

—Peter Altenberg, “Aphorisms” Telegrams from the Soul (Archipelago Books, 2005)

indirect light

An aphorism makes you squint like when a stray ray of light hits the corner of your eye.

three variants

There are three kinds of aphorists: The aphorist pure, who composes his/her brief utterances for effect. The aphorist embedded, whose aperçus arise here and there within prose or poetry. The aphorist accidental, who often uncorks a good one in casual speech recounted by others.

understatement

In a poem the aphorism is best when it comes sotto voce.

straight line

Aphorism: a verse that won’t be turned.

where word is god

Even more than in the poem, it is in the aphorism that the word is god.

—E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, translated by Richard Howard, Arcade Publishing, 1971