not impossible

In a note to himself while working on The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson wrote: "It's all right to be difficult, but you can't be impossible."

[Yesterday on a short birthday trip I went to Gloucester MA for the first time and the first thing I did was to find the house where Charles Olson once lived and wrote his poems.]

patience to see

Unimaginable how much patience is needed to see the simplest things. How much patience I need to write a single verse.

—George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951 (The Belknap Press, Harvard U. Press, 1974), translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos.

writing thaw

It was wonderfully warm & pleasant & the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home—I felt the winter breaking up in me & if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.

—Henry David Thoreau, manuscript volume 18 of the Journals

immovable attitude

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

—Anaïs Nin, August 22, 1936, Fire: From "A Journal of Love, " The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (Mariner Books, 1996)