faith-based readership

For a poet any readership one might imagine is like a belief in God, it has to be taken on faith alone.

spiritual practice

When he was asked his religion, he answered that he practiced Poetry.

language believer

A poet never loses faith with language.

reader response

Because poems have moved you, you know that new poems, and ones yet unwritten, will.

other kind of hero

Hölderlin’s heroism is splendid because it is free from pride and devoid of confidence in victory. All he is aware of is his mission, the summons from the invisible world; he believes in his calling, but has no assurance of success. He is forever vulnerable…It is the feeling that he is foredoomed to destruction, that a menacing shadow dogs his footsteps, which makes his persistence in his chosen course so courageous. The reader must not think that Hölderlin’s faith in poesy as the profoundest meaning of life implies a like belief in his own poetic gifts. As regards these latter he remained humble-minded…Yet for all this personal modesty, for all this sensitiveness, he had a will of steel to animate his devotion to poesy, to fortify him for self-immolation. “My dear friend,” he writes to one of his intimates, “when will people come to see that in our case the greatest force is the most modest in its manifestations, and that the divine message (when it issues from us) is always uttered with humility and sadness?” His heroism was not that of the warrior, not the heroism of triumphant force; it was the heroism of the martyr who is ready, nay, glad, to suffer for the unseen, to perish on behalf of an ideal.

—Stefan Zweig, “Hölderlin,” The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (Pushkin Press, 2012) translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.

imperfect paradise

"The imperfect is our paradise."

—Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of Our Climate"

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Joan Richardson delivered an excellent talk last night for 15th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash entitled "Wallace Stevens' Radiant and Productive Atmosphere." A tracing of how the poet came to translate faith into his "supreme fiction.

The talk was based on an essay in Richardson's A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein.

poetry / religion

The sign in the bookstore read: ‘POETRY/RELIGION’. Yes, I thought, they are beginning to understand that only faith sustains our genre.

don't turn your back on them

As poets we love words and won’t turn our backs on them. As poets we trust words but we don’t turn our backs on them.

abiding faith

The love of words begins with their meanings and sounds, and develops into an abiding faith that these attributes can convey experience and emotion.