wish, wait, will

Some wish for the poem, some wait for the poem, some will the poem.

ride the breath

Less inspire and more spur.

one and the world

What I find extremely interesting is that only those poets who are aware of the “solitary mind” and remain faithful to their personal fate (which makes their return to the solitary mind inevitable) while keeping a place within the “banquet,” only those poets produce works at which we stare in wonder. Yet if they cut themselves off from the world of the “banquet” and withdraw into the solitary mind alone, their works mysteriously lose power.

Between the will which seeks to participate in the world of the “banquet” (the world of the collective spiritual body) and the will which seeks to devote itself purely to the self (the world of the solitary mind) there is tension. As long as this tension is present the works which the poets produce give off their highest luster.

—Ōoka Makoto, The Colors of Poetry: Essays in Classical Japanese Poetry (Katydid Books, 1991), translated by Thomas V. Lento.

willed lines

Let will summons the lines that inspiration was unable to call forth.

candid kind

Last night we had the Nineteenth Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at the Hartford Public Library. The guest speaker was Maureen N. McLane and she gave a wonderful talk. One of the poems featured in her talk was section III from "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." An excerpt:

     The poem refreshes life so that we share,
     For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
     Belief in an immaculate beginning

     And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
     To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
     From that ever-early candor to its late plural

     And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
     Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
     Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

     An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
     The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
     That gives a candid kind to everything.

drenched in words

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come . . . they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit.

—Hart Crane,The Letters of Hart Crane, November 26, 1921