no much

A few lines of text, a glance at an artwork, several bars of music, is all it takes to determine if you’re in the presence of a real artist.

pure presence

In some of my new pieces, when there is nothing happening, I try to take every possible kind of expectation out of the piece. There is no beginning, development, and end. It’s just nothing. It’s just presence, pure presence.
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Failure is such a great territory to learn because if you don’t risk you will never go anywhere…So to include failure in your own process of work, it’s essential.
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Being an artist, you can make things from anything. You can make things from dust. You have this miracle, possibilities.
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Beauty doesn’t have a definition. What is important is what moves you.
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I hate when artists from my generation become tired, depressed, and complain about art being dead. It is nonsense. Art is intrinsic to the human being; it is impossible for it to die.
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You get what you get from me. I don’t hide anything. There is no dark side, because I tell it all.
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I’m not pretending.
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To me, good art has to have not just one but many lives.

—Maria Abramović, Abramović-isms (Princeton U. Press, 2024), edited by Larry Warsh

pure presence

a poem is something in the midst of a white plane
fenced in by itself and enclosed by the surface of its lines.
although it has forgotten where and how it came to be,
it is no lost soul
[…]
a pure presence
each poem is a shell around a kernel possibly invented
each poem is a translation of the one poem that exists only in translation
each poem is its own condition
a poem is that which declares itself to be a poem

—Jutta Schutting, the start and ending of “Poems,” from In der Sprache der Inseln, Contemporary Austrian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press, 1986), edited and translated by Beth Bjorklund

all eyes

The poet walked into the room and all eyes were on her; and her eyes took them all in, because looking was prelude to language.

poem evident

A poem is evidence of human presence…no less than a fossilized footprint on a riverbank from prehistoric times.

in the thick of things

Often in the presence of other art, or one might say under the pressure of other art, poetry arises.

poem qua poem

The poem lacked presence.

poetry made manifest

Seeing Galway Kinnell read his poems wearing an Irish cable knit sweater at Arrowhead, Melville’s house in the Berkshires, circa 1985.

time and the visible

Painting is the art which reminds us that time and the visible come into being together, as a pair. The place of their coming into being is the human mind, which can coordinate events into a time sequence and appearances into a world seen. With this coming into being of time and the visible, a dialogue between presence and absence begins. We all live this dialogue.

—John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (Vintage, 1993)

sound and structure

And I'd done a lot of reading. James Huneker on music. And a lot of poetry—Milton, Shelley, Whitman. Robinson Jeffers came along in the '20s or later—he was tremendous. I liked Milton for the same reason I liked Jeffers, the sound and the structure. I don't believe anything that Milton wrote about, but it has a wonderful presence.

—Ansel Adams, from in his last interview, ART NEWS, Volume 83/No 6, interview by Milton Esterow.

poet present

There are people who write and publish poetry, and there are poets. It’s never hard to tell the difference when in the presence of the latter.

early arrival

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

not as an acrobat

Rexroth calls an "anthropological religion" the basis for his poetry. He has written that the anthropologist Edward Sapir was “the only person I have ever met who thoroughly understood what I dreamed of doing with poetry. Out of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics he had developed a kind of philosophy of interpersonal communion and communication.” Certainly there is a striking resemblance between Rexroth’s thought and that of Sapir, who, for example,…thought that the best poetic style “allows the artist’s personality to be as a presence, not as an acrobat,” because such artists fit “their deep intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech” rather than weave “a private technical art fabric of their own.”

—Morgan Gibson, Kenneth Rexroth (Twayne Publishers, 1972)

(Edward Sapir’s words quoted from Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921)