noise of the soul

He sits in a cramped attic,
The candle stub stings the eye
While the pencil in his hand
Converses with him in private.

He writes a song of sad thoughts,
Catches the shadow of the past within his heart,
And this noise…this noise of the soul…
He will sell tomorrow for a ruble.

—Sergei Yesenin, The Last Poet of the Village: poems by Sergei Yesenin (Sensitive Skin Books, 2019), translated by Anton Yakovlev

retrospective advantage

Often when someone longs for ‘the spirit of the past’, they forget that spirit was a critical distillate made during a successive age.

it's time

   Hegel said that art was a thing of the past. It pleases me to say: to the contrary, poetry is a question for the future, so much so that the future itself belongs to poetry, is poetry. Without poetry there will be no future. The time that would see poetry die will itself be just another death.

   Poetry does not have a time: it is time.

—Adonis, "A Language That Exiles Me,"(boundary 2 / Spring 1999), translated by Pierre Joris

reading matter

Not long ago I wrote a series of poems in response to the collection, The Dream We Carry, by Olav Hauge, a Norwegian. He opened a door for me that I had not known stood closed. He deals in elementals. “A good poem,” he wrote, “should smell of tea, / or of raw earth and freshly cut wood.”

Art is a conversation with the past. Sometimes it is an argument.

—Frederick Smock, On Poetry: Palm-Of-The-Hand Essays (Broadstone Books, 2017)

past that matters

I asked [Akhmatova] if she would ever annotate the Poem Without a Hero: the allusions might be unintelligible to those who did not know the life it was concerned with; did she wish them to remain in darkness? She answered that when those who knew the world about which she spoke were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too; it would be buried with her and her century; it was not written for eternity, not even for posterity: the past alone had significance for poets—childhood most of all—those were the emotions that they wished to re-create and re-live. Vaticination, odes to the future, even Pushkin’s great epistle to Chaadaev, were a form of declamatory rhetoric, a striking of grandiose attitudes, the poet’s eye peering into a dimly discernable future, a pose which she despised.

—Isaiah Berlin, “Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak,” Isaiah Berlin: The Proper Study of Mankind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

tradition in process

Eliot writes that obtaining the tradition “involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twentieth-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” He saw the past “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The canon is steadily undergoing formation, both vertically and—more recently—horizontally. The future will applaud our generation’s widening the stream. We must not, however, as we widen the course of the canon, make its bed shallow. Despite the labor necessary to appreciate them, those dead white guys are great. Sometimes in spite of themselves. Sometimes, I suspect, not even knowing, before they wrote the work, the truth the work reveals.

Too often we ignore the fact that tradition is process. Believing that tradition is created in retrospect, we search tirelessly for the great but unpublished black lesbian poet of the seventeenth century. Perhaps someday someone will find her, and that discovery will force us to make new maps of the literary landscape. What will be changed, however, is not the landscape of the seventeenth century, but that of the generation that discovers her. For tradition, as process, is formed as we go forward. There is no doubling back, no taking that other fork in the road, no rewinding the tape.

—Marilyn Nelson Waniek, “Owning the Masters,” The Gettysburg Review (Spring, 1995)

tradition not by habit

As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoroughly considered. The historical comparisons chosen are part of a continuous tradition relevant to my concerns. When Eliot writes about tradition, his comments are equally relevant to architecture, notwithstanding the more obvious changes in architectural methods due to technological innovations. “In English writing,” Eliot says, “we seldom speak of tradition…Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to a work approved, of some pleasing archeological reconstruction…Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged…Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor…”

—Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966)