[Image: “happy 1st day of january, ’11,” by user “muffett68” on Flickr.]
From whiskey river:
This Blank Page
is where I begin to exist. See, and already you
begin to know me, an insistence somewhere
that your eyes transmute into Voice—thence
the somebody as much as I am that you
apprehend. But I am more arrogant than this, I
am here before you, making the paths through
blank lines of space,
a detergent across the glass of your language,
restoring the shock of perspective
to the household kitchen window
(the view that you had grown up with
till you could see behind all the fences)
so that, following the footprints of my eyes
already quite outside the walls of
this page
you may be lured somewhere further enough to be
more than the small note that was
extension of me.
(Thomas Shapcott [source])
…and:
Last Spring
Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow.
(Gottfried Benn [source])
…and:
Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.
Stay open and ignorant.
(Grace Paley [source])
