in buenos aires

First stanza of Jorge Luis Borges' "Poem about Gifts"...

   Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
   Of this manifesting the mastery
   Of God, who with excelling irony
   Gives me at once both books and night.

[Borges blind or near so at this point, from Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

The old Biblioteca Nacional where Borges served as director from 1955 to 1973.

beauty blinded

This light, this landscape (Poros, Greece), these days start to threaten me seriously. I close the shutters so I can work. I must protect myself from beauty...You feel your brain emptying and lightening; the long day absorbs it. Today I understood why Homer was blind; if he had had eyes he wouldn't have written anything.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

blind curve

Though dangerous when driving, a blind curve is sought after when writing/reading a line of verse.

street view

Do the great poems open up new avenues or do they create blind alleys that other poets must run down?

sound of a blindman's cane striking

Just back from Germany, I thought I'd post something by a German poet...

I write poems to orient myself in reality. I view them as trigonometric points or buoys that mark a course in an unknown area. Only through writing do things take on reality for me. Reality is my goal, not my presupposition. First, I must establish it.
[...]
Let us use the word “definition” for these trigonometric signs. Such definitions are not only useful for the writer but it is absolutely necessary that he set them up. In each good line of poetry I hear the cane of the blindman striking: I am on secure ground now.

—Gunter Eich, "Some Remarks on 'Literature and Reality',”
Valuable Nail: Selected Poems of Gunter Eich,
Oberlin College Press, 1981, translated by Stuart Freibert