burned library

Such was his erudition that when he died it felt like a great library had burned.

[Thinking of Borges]

know how

Knowing things makes for better writing: connections multiply, metaphors arise easily.

never know enough

We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

—Robinson Jeffers, "The Epic Stars"

a certain relation

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

—Susan Sontag, “On Photography” (1977)

To write a poem is to appropriate the thing written about. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

why read poetry

Reason #449 to read poetry: Poetry is a repository of knowledge about our world.

original gift

...I think some intensity of awareness must be lost, since it depends on contrast. And that intensity is impoverishment's aftermath, and blessing: what succeeds temporary darkness, what succeeds the void or the desert, is not the primary gift of the world but the essential secondary gift of knowledge, a sense of the significance of the original gift, the scale of our privilege.

—Louise Glück, “On Impoverishment,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

one hundred

If you can’t name one hundred poets, then you can’t say you have even partial knowledge of contemporary poetry.

covering the waterfront

I know all of the poets except the ones I don’t know.

poetry god

It was said of him that no one knew more about poetry than he did.

small window

He talked in those commonplaces of the workshop method, thus you could tell that everything he knew about poetry was learned in the couple of years he’d spent in a MFA program.

few maxims

Clearness is the ornament of deep thought.

Obscurity is the kingdom of error.

Few maxims are true in every respect.

It is of no use to possess a lively wit if it is not of right proportion: the perfection of a clock is not to go fast, but to be accurate.

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.

The favorites of fortune and fame topple from their pedestals before our eyes without diverting us from ambition.

It is easy to criticize an author; it is difficult to appreciate him.

As there are many soldiers, and few brave ones, so there are many versifiers and almost no poets.

—Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747), Selections from the Characters, Reflexions, and Maxims
Translated by Elizabeth Lee (Archibald Constable & Co., 1903)

never know exactly

Stevens in one of his last poems says he imagines as a kind of final act of nature a bird singing ‘without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song.’ The idea that every creature has its own reality scared poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, made some of them feel we were groping blindly---it in effect kicked us out of the comfortable anthropocentric community—but it also allowed some modern poets this sense of absolute mystery at the core of existence. It came of knowing that we would never know exactly what a bird’s experience is, or what an ant’s experience is. It has been an unhousing of the imagination, and it was brought on by the thrust of science to be at home in the world by understanding it. It said we move among great powers and mysteries and only glimpse their meanings, the meaning of what it’s like to be another creature, and therefore also the meaning of being a self, a person.

—Robert Hass, The Poetic Species: A conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass (Bellevue Literary Press, New York, 2014, p. 55-56.)

gods gone to ground

The more you know of the masters the less you are impressed.

negative space

Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. Its knowledges are all negative and, therefore, more positive than any knowledge. Nothing that can be said about it in words is worth saying.

—A. R. Ammons, “A Poem Is a Walk,” Claims for Poetry (U. of Michigan Press, 1983), ed. Donald Hall, 8.

tested by the text

A reader of poetry is a serious and savvy character; has to be.

not meteorological facts

The aim of a lyric poem in which occur the words ‘sunshine’ and ‘clouds,’ is not to inform us of certain meteorological facts, but to express certain feelings of the poet and to excite similar feelings in us. A lyric poem has no assertional sense, no theoretical sense, it does not contain knowledge.

—Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (lectures delivered at the University of London, 1934)

recycled criticism

It was evident by the critic’s writing that everything he knew he’d learned.

a life's work and then some

At the time of his death at 29, the poet and philosopher Novalis was working on an ‘Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge’. So much like a poet, to think such a project possible, even had he lived a long time.

fantastic, mysterious practices

Extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for attaining higher knowledge. —Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It (Anthroposophic Press, 1947)

Extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for attaining higher poetry.