#poetry

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#assembly-line #dejan-stojanovic #final #literature #literature-quotes

It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there. ↗

— Helen Bevington

#beauty #clarity #nature #observation #poetry

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: ‘For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.’ “Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius ‘not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.’ Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. ↗

— Jane Hirschfield

#difficulty #poetry #art

Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into! ↗

— Frank Iero

#break #comics #i #into #know

My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her. ↗

— Guy Johnson

#asked #her #i #me #mother

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#eastern #heart #learning #literature #poetry

أخرج لا لشيء أعود محملة بدفاتر جميعها زرقاء كل واحد منها يشبهني ↗

— لطيفة الحاج

#poetry #dreams

Come to the beach with me And watch the pelicans die, Hear their feeble screams Calling to an empty sky Where once they played And scouted for food, Not scavenging like the gulls But plummeting unafraid Into friendly waters. Come to the beach with me And watch the pelicans die, Listen to their feeble screams Calling to an empty sky. Maybe Christ will walk by And save them in their final toil Or work a miracle from the shore, A courtesy of Union Oil. Come to the beach with me And watch the pelicans die. My God! They'll never fly again. It's worse than Normandy somehow, For there we only murdered men. ↗

— James Kavanaugh

#food

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry. ↗

— Michael Tippett

#changed #extra #fascinating #go #into

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. ↗

— Tom Wesselmann

#deal #few #got #i #months