John Estes

David Abrams

Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.

D.H. Lawrence

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

George Steiner

I must, even if only provisionally, consider the intimate complementarities between an authentic act of reading, an authentic motion of answerability to music and to art, and the rights to human privacy, to the wholly personal hospitality we owe our death—rights and an indebtedness now under pressure of narcotic devaluation in a culture of the secondary.

Richard Rorty

I think the most one can do by way of linking up pragmatism with America is to say that both the country and [Dewey] suggest that we can, in politics, substitute hope for the sort of knowledge which philosophers have usually tried to attain. America has always been a future-orieted country, a country which delights in the fact that it invented itself in the relatively recent past.

John Keats, from Lamia

Love in a hut, with water and crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast:--

William Wordsworth, from ‘The Thorn’

And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Allen Grossman

The subject matter of poetry, whatever its means may be, however vast a net it throws over the world of objects, is always, in my view, the person. For poetry there is no sky which is different from the unknown inwardness of other selves, the knowledge of which will construct selves as persons. I see for poetry no possibility and, indeed, no need consistent with its nature or its purpose in the world to make any offering whatsoever toward a world which is not the person.

Letter to Li Tzu-jan

Old Jan! Have you written any poems recently? If we don't write poems, how can we make it through these boring days?

All in all, nothing in this world is that hard to do--just charge ahead and do it! A day will inevitably come when "the ditch will be dug and the waters flow through." I only fear that you will be overly cautious, that you may be unwilling to take the risk and plunge ahead. Well, force yourself a little! It would be a good idea not to prove yourself undeserving of a friend's encouragement.

Robert Frost

...it's not a progression, it's a circulation, a life-long circulation. No poem is intelligible except in the light of all the other poems, all the poems that were ever written, so you better get about them, circulating among them.

What We Know About Writers

From Those Who Create, by Jane Piirto:
1. They are often early readers.
2. They have often experienced childhood trauma and may suffer from depression.
3. They used early reading and writing to escape.
4. They have high conceptual and verbal intelligence
5. They are independent, nonconforming, and not interested in joining groups
6. They value self-expression and are productive
7. They are often driven, able to take rejection, and like to work alone for long periods of time.
8. They often have difficulty with alcohol.
9. They prefer writing as their mode of expression of emotions and feelings.
10.  They often have an advanced verbal sense of humor.

Walt Whitman, a rough, “A backward glance”

I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others, and rigidly their own, as the land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems today, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective. . . .

Wendell Berry

"Poetry," Thoreau said, "is nothing but healthy speech..." By which he meant, I suppose, speech that is not only healthy in itself, but conducive to the health of the speaker, giving him a true and vigorous relation to the world.

Adrienne Rich

Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name.

Robert Haas

...Pound's deepest interest in the ritual: that it was about transformation and renewal at every level, about any time in our lives when we step into the pulse of life, as if into fire or the current of a river, and are altered by it. It is about any transfiguration. To read, to read deeply, and to be changed by what we read is to have eaten the flame.

Donald Revell

Alone with the Alone, poetry is nevertheless ringed round by a friendship and by the adventure of Friendship. A poem is a force for change produced by change, bearing witness to some new phase (or phrase) in the love relationship between a poet's soul and a poet's self. These friends are a solitude together, and the conversation of their silence leaves a trace, a phosphorescence if you will. The trace is a poem.

Ron Silliman, “Of theory, of Practice”

The writer cannot organize her desires for writing without some vision of the world toward which one hopes to work, and without having some concept of how literature might participate in such a future.

Wallace Stegner

Most artists are flawed; but they probably ought to make the effort not to be. But how do you teach people to enlarge themselves in order to enlarge their writing? You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of person you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, its teeth grow long and lock.

I guess you can suggest the ideal of it, the notion that it is a good thing to be large and magnanimous and wise, that it is a better aim in life than pleasure or money or fame. By comparison, it seems to me, pleasure and money, and probably fame as well, are contemptible goals. I would go so far as to say that to a class. But not all of the class would believe me.

Edward Abbey

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.

Wendell Berry

To assume that the context of literature is "the literary world" is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for awhile yet. But they will finally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study of literature and restore it to importance.

Samuel Johnson (Boswell)

Talking of education, "People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!"

Joseph Meeker

Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he be weak, stupid, undignified. As the tragic hero suffers or dies for his ideals, the comic hero survives without them. At the end of his tale he manages to marry his girl, evade his enemies, slip by the oppressive authorities, avoid drastic punishment, and to stay alive.

Tragedy demands that choices be made among alternatives; comedy assumes that all choice is likely to be in error and that survival depends upon finding accommodations that will permit all parties to endure.

Jacques Barzun

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.

And when will art cease to be something so exclusively for nice people?

Sven Birkerts

Reading creates an imaginary context which then becomes a place of rescue.

Aldo Leopold

The duck hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accoutrements, are doing the same thing. Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, esthetic exercises.

Ask a Ninja

It's Ninja-riffic

Clayton Eshelman

The desire to write poetry lead first to seeing the vilifigura, the reviled face, the shame of your own face. To embrace your soul may be to experience the extent to which you despise your soul, the extent to which whatever this soul is feels despised--for what have you actively asked of it before?

Henry David Thoreau

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a loghouse with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven years or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.

R.P. Blackmur

The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom: language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.

Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture

Eventually I had to decide that there was only one way to give the course, which was to give it without strategies and without conscious caution. It was not honorable, either to the students or to the authors, to conceal or disguise my relation to the literature, my commitment to it, my fear of it, my ambivalence toward it. The literature had to be dealt with in the terms it announced itself. As for the students, I have never given assent to the modern saw about "teaching students, not subjects"--I have always thought it right to teach subjects, believing that if one gives his first loyalty to the subject, the student is best instructed. So I resolved to give the course with no considerations in mind except my own interests. And since my own interests lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate moral fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to do with literary style, I felt free to begin with what for me was a first concern, the animus of the author, the objects of his will, the the things he wants or wants to have happen.

Chen Shengtan, Preface to the Western Chamber

I am sure the future generations will want to read, and wanting to read, they must have friends. These friends come and go, and sometimes do not come, and do not leave. Perhaps one likes a passage, and he reads and lets the others hear it. Perhaps one doubts the ideas of a passage, and he reads it and discusses it with them. Then all of them read it together and discuss it together. They all sit together and do not read and laugh and have a good time. I wish to be their friend and read and enjoy and discuss a passage with them. Unfortunately, they are not yet born, and when they are born, I shall have gone. What can I do?

Walter Benjamin

Who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship, and not children?

Gary Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom”

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.

Robert Frost

Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material--the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Charles Olson

Idealisms of any sort, like logic and like classification, intervene at just the moment they become more than the means they are, are allowed to become ways as end instead of ways to end, END, which is never more than this instant, than you on this instant, then you, figuring it out, and acting so. Find ways to stay in the human universe, and not to be led to partition reality at any point, in any way.

Elaine Scarry, “On beauty and being just”

Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life.

Ilya Kaminsky

I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth
and confess, I loved grapefruit.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

What is a true metaphor? It is...'footsteps of nature' whose noise we hear alike in primitive language and in the finest metaphors of poets. Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

A genuine poem...allows us toe experience nearness in such a way that this nearness is held in and through the linguistic form of the poem. Whenever we have to hold something, it is because it is transient and threatens to escape our grasp. In fact, our fundamental experience as being subject to time is that all things escape us.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows on to dream in peace.

Gary Snyder

Civilization, which has made us so successful a species, has overshot itself and now threatens us with inertia. There also is some evidence that civilized life isn't good for the gene pool. To achieve Changes we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds.

Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”

It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called dying ground.

Sarah Hannah

There came a twitch. The tree's seismograph.
I waited until it couldn't get darker.