Current quotation : archive

Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.

Wallace Stevens
from 'Agagia' from Opus Posthumous ed. Milton J Bates, rev. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1990)

...creation takes place on the tenuous thread of a sentence, in the fleeting life of an expression.

Gaston Bachelard
from The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969; first published in French in 1958)

Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding. Perception means all of them.

Agnes Martin
from Writings (Hatje Cantz, 1992, 6th ed. 2005)

If tone is wrong, nothing is right.

Mary Oliver
from 'Sand Dabs, Seven' from Long Life: essays and other writings (Da Capo Press, 2004)

The act of observing changes what we observe.

Gary Snyder
from Talking on the Water: conversations about nature and creativity by Jonathan White (Sierra Club Books, 1994)

'THING' POEMS

There is a difference between a poem which is 'about' a thing and a poem which is a thing - its own thing, but not necessarily without reference to something else.

Ian Hamilton Finlay
(Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995)

The patterns on the stream's surface as it ripples over the rocks, or on the bark of an elm tree, or in a cluster of weeds, are all composed of repetitive figures that never exactly repeat themselves, of iterated shapes to which our senses may attune themselves even while the gradual drift and metamorphosis of those shapes draws our awareness in unexpected and unpredictable directions.

David Abram
from The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)

...simplicity of form is not necessarily simplicity of experience.

Robert Morris
quoted in Minimal Art, Daniel Marzona 
(Köln: Taschen, 2004)

'What you see is what you get, but you have to look to see all that's there'. 

A rancher, quoted by Gretel Ehrlich in The Solace of Open Spaces (Viking Penguin, 1985) 

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience. 

Patrick Kavanagh

A true revelation, it seems to me, will only emerge from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurers, nor with travellers to exotic destinations. The surest - also the quickest - way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before. 

Cesare Pavese
from Dialoghi con Leuco (1947)
as quoted at the beginning of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
(Hartley & Mark, 2002)

Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don't sterilize. ...Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn't mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole. It also doesn't mean in any way diminishing something's 'interestingness', the quality that compels us to look at that something over, and over, and over again.

Leonard Koren
from Wabi Sabi (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1994)

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