broken and off

Nothing about the fragment gave evidence of its ever having been part of a worthwhile whole.

block off the chip

The book I ordered, a study of the fragment in literature, arrived today. Turns out it’s over four-hundred pages.

fragment or figment

Forever certain there is a magnificent fragment in my notebook, if only I could find it.

part way

He was a writer who didn’t finish things.

winslow homer

The consummate designer of the great compositions based his design upon the same acute observation that delights us in the sketches; the brilliant sketcher, though he does not carry design to its ultimate perfection, is yet always a born designer, so that almost any one of his sketches has the possibility of a great picture in it, and his slightest note is a whole, not a mere fragment.

—Kenneth Cox, What is Painting?: Winslow Homer and Other Essays (W. W. Norton, 1988).

ex nihilo

Why is it necessary that a fragment suggests a whole?

new into old

[André] Chénier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermès in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopédie of Diderot into a poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. This poem was to treat of man’s position in the Universe, first in an isolated state, and then in society. It remains fragmentary, and though some of the fragments are fine, its attempt at scientific exposition approximates too closely to the manner of Erasmus Darwin to suit a modern ear. Another fragment called L’Invention sums Chénier’s Ars Poetica in the verse “Sur des pensers nouveaux, faisons des vers antiques.” ["From new thoughts, let us make antique verses"]

[1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Chénier, André de]

fragment transcendent

The close relationship between the Romantic conception of literature and the fragment was most explicitly articulated in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other German Romantic writers based in and around the university town of Jena from the end of eighteenth to beginning to nineteenth century. For instance, Friedrich Schlegel declares: ‘There is so much poetry and yet there is nothing more rare than a poem!’ This is due to the vast quantity of poetical sketches, studies, fragments, tendencies, ruins, and raw materials’*.

—Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge, 2016)

*Philosophical Fragments by Friedrich Schlegel, translated by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

midden of broken things

A fragment gathers with others of its kind.

broken thing

In poetry, sometimes a sentence is too much, and only a fragment will do.

linear entity

The poetic line resists the fetish for a sentence.

hole cloth

A poem whole was impossible. Most passages came apart during reading. Even in the middle of a line he could lose his way and fall into fragment.

piecemeal

Six fragments in search of a poem. [after Pirandello]

intermittent narrator

The journal is only the form of memoir I can abide, being piecemeal, fragmentary, sequential only in fits & starts, like life.

to fill the silence

Many individual voices rise again in the dusk. Yeats dead, Pound silenced, Eliot lost to the theatre, Thomas gone before his time—it is the hour of the twittering machines. We listen to them as we drink our martinis or smoke a cigarette, and for an hour or two we feel content. Then the night comes and there is no voice to fill the silence. That is not as used to be. Poetry used to be in speech, in transaction, in worship; at the banquet, before the battle, in the moment of birth and burial. Why is poetry no longer our daily bread? We have to search for an answer to this question, and the search leads us to the foundations of our society. We have the poetry we deserve, just as we have the painting we deserve, the music we deserve; and if it is fragmented, personal, spasmodic, we have only to look around us to see the satanic chaos through which nevertheless a few voices have penetrated. The voices are pitched high and may sometimes sound discordant; but the image they convey has crystalline brightness and hardness, and cannot be shrouded.

—Herbert Read, “The Image in Modern English Poetry,” The Tenth Muse (Horizon Press, 1957)

free associative fragment

Splinter line.

thought / breath

In poetry the sentence fragment operates as a unit of thought or breath.

necessarily brief and flashing apparitions

“…the fragment understood as a new genre, perhaps the only genre of our time, a legitimate and self-sufficient expression of the lyric moment, the product of a poetics which does not wish to mix the necessarily brief and flashing apparitions of poetry with elements of a different, voluntary nature.”

—Eugenio Montale, “On the Poetry of [Dino] Campana,” (1942), Second Life of Art, Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale (Ecco Press, 1982), translated by Jonathan Galassi