Posts Tagged ‘William Carlos Williams’
Quote of the Day
We must see, steal, beg, borrow—but we borrow only that which we want.
—William Carlos Williams, “The Pluralism of Experience”
Quote of the Day
Sometimes during the war, when the boys were at sea—as at other times of stress—it would be comforting to be carrying a poem in my head, searching for an aberrant structure—and unable for the whole day to get it down. The ideas for a prose statement would keep me warm.
Quote of the Day
In the structure the artist speaks as an artist purely. There he cannot lie. The artist as a man of action perpetuates his deed and records himself as a reality in the structure of his work—for which the content is merely useful.
Quote of the Day
I choose poetry. I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough. I choose the unknown (for now), the mystery rather than the accepted solution, the cracked bowl over the flawless one, the voice that has a little spit and phlegm in it, the used shoes, imagination over analysis, Williams over Stevens, the impure every time.
How is a poem like a machine?
To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character…
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. Your attention is called now and then to some beautiful line or sonnet-sequence because of what is said there. So be it. To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line “says?”
There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.
Quote of the Day
—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!
Quote of the Day
The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven’t been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
Alec Nevala-Lee 