floor to ceiling

The beauty of a good bookshop filled floor to ceiling with loaded shelves, or any well-stocked library for that matter, is that you feel here is a place equal to the mind, housing and holding the known and making available the unknown of this world.

unknown poets

All the good poets we don’t notice, or who are simply unknown to us.

acknowledged after

If history holds, there will be some lesser known poets more known a generation or two hence.

less of the same

You have written and published a dozen books and you are almost unknown among fellow poets, not to mention any greater audience. Is it not time to slow down, to re-set, and to see if you can find a strain of poetry that will be recognized?

drop zone

A poet doesn’t sit down to write so much as s/he must parachute over unknown territory.

going there

A poet doesn’t know what’s ineffable.

poet's lot

His therapist assured him that being an unknown poet was not something to be ashamed of.

target exposed

The plagiarist’s target was an unknown, but after the theft was noticed for the first time.

stealing from the poor

The plagiarist is most damned by stealing from the unknown and underappreciated. The plagiarist hasn’t the guts to rip off one of the renowned, because the exposure would be swift and pitiless.

portmanteau

Language is luggage; prepare to travel.

plagiarist's curse

We must pity the plagiarists. For they’re forced to steal second-rate texts in order to escape immediate detection. And thankfully the truly great texts, the treasures of the age, some laying open for all to see, are unknown by anyone.

reaching for

Each line seemed to be an arm reaching out in the dark.

bright birds yet unseen

I hear a hitherto unknown species of bird has been found in the forests of Malaysia. Scanning my bookcases I feel certain there are bright and rare poems yet undiscovered behind those spines. But as wonderful as they are, only human encounter makes them existent.

hidden transmitter

A good poem will always continue broadcasting from an undisclosed location.

point on the horizon

The linebreak as a vanishing point you can’t quite see beyond.

working into my own, unknown

The first seven drawings are from a group that I made in 1915-1916 when I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language—charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel and oil. The use of my materials wasn’t a problem for me. But what to say with them? I had been taught to work like others and after careful thinking I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done.

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught—not like what I had seen—shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), edited by Doris Bry, first published as limited edition portfolio in 1974.