our logos and the cosmos

In Heraclitus’ fragments, the structure of language, the structure of thought, and the structure of the cosmos itself are all underpinned by a hidden logos. First, there is spoken logos, which humans possess, then there is the logos of the cosmos, which is silent. The correct articulation of the former leads to the revelation of the latter.

—Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton U. Press, 2019)

flickering effects

Like Constable, Tomlinson admires accidents because they are governed by laws, however difficult to fathom (just as his poetry careens between seeming laxness and the occasional inevitability of rhyme and meter); he most values the peculiar combination of revelation and concealment brought about by changes of light in a landscape. The pleasure of seeing and then rendering, whether in paint or in language, the unstable, flickering effects in an external scene “discovers” (his word) one’s true identity, allowing the artist to become himself only during the moments when he is actively engaged in reproducing his passive observations. What we see uncovers what we are; what we are defines what we discover. By using as an epigraph to his poem Constable’s own inquiry into the relation between science and painting (“May not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?”), Tomlinson implicitly asks whether landscape poems might not constitute equivalent experiments.

—Willard Spiegelman, “Just Looking: Charles Tomlinson and the ‘Labour of Observation’,” How Poets See The World: The art of description in contemporary poetry (Oxford U. Press, 2005)

from poetry expect poetry

How little divides us finally from Longinus and his classic work on the sublime, written in the early years of our era. The literary encyclopedia reminds us that the sublime is not a formal feature of a work and can’t be defined by way of rhetorical categories. It is instead “a spark that leaps from the soul of the writer to the soul of the reader.” Has so much really changed? Don’t we still wait greedily for that spark?

Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes. These worthy qualities and forms perform splendidly in their proper place—in an essay, a scholarly tract, a broadside in an opposition newspaper. In poetry, though, we seek the vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry.

—Adam Zagajewski, title essay, A Defense of Ardor (FSG, 2002), translated by Clare Cavanaugh

debris reader

A poet is a vagrant reader, a debris reader: Cereal boxes, fortune cookies, instruction manuals, pill bottle labels, junk mail, coupons, ticket stubs. Any scrap of printed matter, no matter how inconsequential, may yield a revelation.

procrustean

All form is procrustean. The paradox of form: what is de rigueur often leads to revelation.