language exceeds

A poet amazed that the poem exceeded his modest expectation. But language is like that.

different reasons

Philosophers and poets are fond of the aphorism for different reasons.

teaching poets

You can be too good a teacher-poet: One begins being thought of as a better teacher but a lesser poet.

undisturbed philistine

[Printed on the complimentary bookmark from Blackwell’s, 50, 51 Broad Street, Oxford]
The famous Bookshop where generations of undergraduates and graduates, poets and philistines alike, have browsed to their hearts’ content undisturbed.
—The Sunday Times [no date given]

n.b.: I first read ‘philosophers’ for ‘philistines’ in the quote above. Attracting ‘poets and philosophers alike’ would be a better bit of advertising for the bookshop. What good is a browsed book that cannot disturb a philistine?

no system

Nietzsche is the one modern philosopher whom the layman has a fair chance of understanding. Perhaps that makes him not a philosopher. Perhaps it makes him a poet. (A non sequitur.) Or is there a connection in this sphere between being understandable and being insane?

Commenting on the unresolved contradictions in Nietzsche’s writing, H.G. Schenk describes what he has left us as ‘the intellectual echo of the recurrent oscillations of his soul, observed with utmost sensitivity’. In introducing Human, All Too Human in R.J. Hollingdale’s translation, Erich Heller remarks that even the most impressive philosophical systems is perched uncomfortably on a throne of rock-bottom stupidity, the self-induced narrow-mindedness which leads man to believe that he, a small part of an immense world, is capable of making absolutely coherent sense of it all. Heller is championing aphorisms, which, through their brevity, achieve ‘a kind’ of finality, one which we know, the world being so immense, isn’t more than a kind of. One effect of eluding narrow-mindedness and resisting schematization, something more commonly observed in poets…

—D. J. Enright, Interplay: a kind of commonplace book (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

one-way street

Some failed philosophers become poets, but failed poets seldom become philosophers.

early arrival

A poet commands a presence before the first word is spoken.

seven things

My take on 7 things you should know about being a poet:

1) Pobiz and poetry are mutually exclusive.

2) You should make a life and then be a poet too.

3) Though some may dress unusually, poets are not exotic creatures. Black is always in fashion.

4) If you’re prone to envy, poetry is not going to be a satisfying endeavor for you. Bitterness is sure to set in.

5) Poets may make little money, yet one might say they live in a state of privileged impoverishment.

6) Poets who need writing prompts and exercises to produce poems should give up the art.

7) Poetry is a sweet slow poison.