blank and expectant

It was one of those lovely blank notebooks you just knew you could write great things in.

desire to try

However complex and difficult the poem may be, it should engender in the reader a desire to unravel its mysteries.

keep an animal

[The poet’s] tragedy is summed up in these word written in a private letter by a contemporary American poet: “For more than a month I have not been able to find time to write anything, and you know how heavy that is to a writer who feels all of youth lost to keep an animal.” Here is the animal, crying to be feed and warmed and housed. Here is the poet, who cannot rest from wanting to set down the bit of reality that he has been able to seize.

—Babette Deutsch, “The Plight of Poetry,” The American Mercury (May 1926)

create trap

The notion that you must make things which you have no real impulse to realize.

desire finds its object

Soliloquies. Arias. Father-son dramatic agon. Symphonies—whatever we crave to experience over and over as we discover what art can be. Love buries these ghost-forms within us. Forms are the language of desire before desire has found its object.

—Frank Birdart, “Thinking Through Form,” Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (U. of Michigan Press, 1996), edited by David Lehman.

desire path

Despite structure or tradition, the poetic line is a desire path.

sharp rebound

Complex and subtle interests, which the mind spins for itself may occupy art and poetry or our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come back with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions—anger, desire, regret, pity, and fear; and what corresponds to them in the sensuous world—bare, abstract, fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has called the ‘glory of motion’. [99]

—Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” Essays on Literature and Art (J.M Dent & Sons, 1973)

moral compass

“I can’t imagine an immoral person bothering with poetry," [Lucien Stryk] shoots back, “and by ‘immoral,’ I’m not talking about trivialities. I mean in the largest sense, in the way the person relates to the world, his spirit. In the poets that affect me, there is always that element of desire and hope.”

I thirsted for seasons,
dragging a leaden shadow
into nothingness. Now,

as fire meets ice, I see.

[from “Lake Down”]

—Lucien Stryk, quoted by Susan Porterfield in “Poetry and Lentil Soup: A Profile of Lucien Stryk,” the afterword of Where We Are: Selected Poems and Zen Translations (Skoob Books, LTD, London, 1997) by Lucien Stryk

memory or imagination

Poetry torn/born between the urge to memorialize and the desire to imagine.

do you want to do

Actually, what I am consuming so happily is an absence: a paradox anything but paradoxical, if we remember that Mallarmé made it the very principle of poetry: “I say: a flower and…musically there rises the fragrant idea itself, the one missing from all bouquets.”

The fifth subject is the subject of production: the one who wants to re-produce the canvas. Thus this morning, December 31, 1978, it is still dark, it is raining, everything is still when I sit down at my worktable again. I look at Hérodiade (1960), and I really have nothing to say about it, except the same platitude: I like it. But suddenly something new appears, a desire: the desire to do the same thing: to go to another table (not the one where I write), to choose colors and to paint, to draw. Ultimately the question of painting is: “Do you want to do a Twombly?”

—Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms (U. of California Press, 1991), translated by Richard Howard