Category Archives: Poetry

Mauron on Mallarmé

February 8, 2013

“All who remember the day when first they looked into the Poems or the Divagations will testify to that curious feeling of exclusion which put them, in the face of a text written with their words (and moreover, as they could somehow… Continue reading →

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The Blindness of Needles, by Bruce Bond

February 1, 2013

When a maker of images goes deaf, he sees a world clarified by silence, a lens wept over the things unspoken. Doubtless this is why we find the man facedown on a drawing table, hands on his head to shelter… Continue reading →

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Steiner on Art

February 1, 2013

“Whatever enriches the adult imagination, whatever complicates consciousness and thus corrodes the clichés of daily reflex, is a high moral act. Art is privileged, indeed obliged, to perform this act; it is the live current which splinters and regroups the… Continue reading →

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The Seeming, by Muriel Rukeyser

February 1, 2013

Between the illuminations of great mornings there comes the dailiness of doing and being and the hand as it makes as it brightens    burnishes the surfaces    seemings       mirrors of the world We do not know… Continue reading →

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From “Hotel Lautreamont” by John Ashberry

February 1, 2013

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality. Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate. It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. It remains for… Continue reading →

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Beckett on Language

February 1, 2013

“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at… Continue reading →

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Barthelme on not knowing

February 1, 2013

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation” — from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme. Photograph by Eva Vermandel, from Splinter.

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One off: from “Ghosts at Garnet” by Richard Hugo

November 23, 2012

What endures is what we have neglected: tins that fed them, rusting now in piles. For weeds all Mays are equal yellow. Beneath our skin, gold veins run wild to China. That false front on the bar that stands is… Continue reading →

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Our Valley, by Philip Levine

November 23, 2012

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and… Continue reading →

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Meyer on poetry

November 23, 2012

“Poetry celebrates not only presence but the multiplicity of presence & the infinite possibilities of there. The poem has the power of location, it is a place — an actual (not metaphorical!) spatial event of language which begins in the mouth… Continue reading →

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