[Image: Cartoon by James Thurber, originally published in The New Yorker December 3, 1932. Caption there: “Touché!” One story about this drawing — I have no idea how accurate — says that the magazine’s editors came up with the cartoon caption first, but needed a cartoonist to illustrate it. They assigned it to Thurber because they didn’t want to gross out the squeamish: no one could possibly believe Thurber-drawn characters would bleed.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
It’s not that poetry reveals more about the world, it doesn’t, but it reveals more about our interactions with the world than our other modes of expression. And it doesn’t reveal more about ourselves alone in isolation, but rather it reveals that mix of self and other, self and surrounding, where the world ends and we begin, where we end and the world begins. That’s the terrain of poetry, and I think that if we experience the world through our senses, or what we recall of the world in memory, or of our experience in memory, poetry has more to say about that than anything else.
(Mark Strand [source])
…and:
In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare Music
Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful.Then, by the end of morning,
he’s gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.
And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and (in a slightly different translation):
How charming it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
(Friedrich Nietzsche [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Inevitably, the stuff readers often cite as “risky” doesn’t strike me that way at all. What’s really risky, I think, for all writers, is staying with a sensation or image or idea that you have no words for at all and are certain is way bigger than you are. Being up against a thing—a sensation, an idea, a whole project unfolding—that you just aren’t at all sure you can make, a thought you aren’t at all sure you can realize (or one that you won’t realize as vital when it’s there in front of you!) is the big, long-term, committed risk of writing.
(Lia Purpura [source])
…and:
Picture of Little Letters
I think I like this room.
The curtains and the furniture aren’t the same
Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to
Late in the morning, after the others had gone to work.
You can even shave in it. On the dresser with the mirror
Are a couple of the pictures we took one afternoon
Last May, walking down the alley in the late sunlight.
I remember now how we held hands for fifteen minutesAfterwards. The words meander through the mirror
But I don’t want them now, I don’t want these abbreviations.
What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography
Of the nerves, but what I like in photography
Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood.The late afternoon sunlight is slanting through the window
Again, sketching the room in vague gestures of discontent
That roll off the mind, and then only seem to disappear.
What am I going to do now? And how am I going to sleep tonight?A peculiar name flickers in the mirror, and then disappears.
(John Koethe [source])
…and:
“…We don’t give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say ‘this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,’ to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this.”
(Neal Stephenson [source])
…and:
The East Berliner, 1989
They didn’t come for the bananas,
but everyone who came through
that hole in the wall wanted one,
the West ready with its Welkommen!
mountains of yellow.
After twenty-eight years of concrete-cold
days and only those few flowers
defiant in the cracks of denial,
imagine the yellow-fresh sight,
that spike on the tongue,
the fireworks and flares
shot through the half-language
of heavy machines shattering
the cold Baltic chill, the half-song,
half-wail of horns, sirens and shouts
and behind it all, Beethoven’s 9th,
then that East Berliner, shuffling out,
hatless and dazed in a worm-eaten brown coat
to see it, and not believe it—
the bright yellow word he’ll take home
to his wife, tight in his fist.
(Ginger Murchison [source])
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