all art

Little by little, pictures encumbered all the rooms, till only a room or two was left for the purposes of the man who required to eat, sleep, entertain his friends. Little by little the hours in which he was still the man whom he was so well, became rarer. His house was already almost a museum, his flesh and blood little more than the place where a work of art was being accomplished.

—Marcel Proust “Gustave Moreau,” Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919 (Dell Publishing Co., 1964), translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

trusted structure

The first line like a sturdy lintel above the house’s doorway.

human things

For our ancestors, a house, a fountain, even clothing, a coat, was much more intimate. Each thing, almost, was a vessel in which what was human found and defined itself.

Now, from America, empty, indifferent things sweep in—pretend things, life-traps…A house, in the American sense, an American apple, a grapevine, bears no relation to the hope and contemplation which our ancestors informed and beheld them.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Witold Hulewicz, Nov. 13, 1925, quoted in A Year With Rilke (Harper Collins, 2009), translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

silent tribute

Cavafy was as reticent and decorous in conversation as he was outspoken in his poetry—some things, he said, needed art to make them beautiful. But it is related that if a beautiful face showed itself in his house, he paid it the silent tribute of lighting another candle.

—Robert Liddell, “Studies in Genius, VII – Cavafy,” Horizon, Vol XVIII, 105, 1948.

word house

Once he encountered that word, in that moment he knew he’d have to build a poem to house it properly.

house and city

If the poem is the house, the book is the city.

walls of sound

Poet, be a sound housebuilder.

more is more

I'm against opulent poetry just as I'm against opulent houses.