alternate route

Poets and artists must resist this: The MFA way or the highway.

A degree works for some but not for others. A watershed has many tributaries.

required study

To really know poetry requires an education akin to training in the sciences.

conditional audience

An educated and experienced readership is the necessary and sufficient condition for great poetry.

pang or spur

Reading for me has the unfortunate side effect of causing a pang of ignorance whenever I encounter a name, a place or an event I’m unfamiliar with. Rather than a pang, perhaps I should think of it as a spur, urging me on.

poetry ready

A reader of poetry has responsibilities: among which are open-mindedness and a wide-ranging education.

working into my own, unknown

The first seven drawings are from a group that I made in 1915-1916 when I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel and oil. The use of my materials wasn’t a problem for me. But what to say with them? I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught—not like what I had seen—shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.

book byways

I trust that in my haphazard scholarship I’ll be reading books others are not.