RUEFLE on THE REFRAIN

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don't be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don't be afraid. Go to sleep now.

-from the Introduction to Madness, Rack And Honey, forthcoming from Wave Books (August 2012)

ANNE CARSON on LEAR TOWN

Clamor the bells falling bells.
Precede silence of bells.
As madness precedes.
Winter as childhood.
Precedes father.
Into the kill-hole.


-from"The Life of Towns"

VALÉRY on THE SOUND OF A HORN IN THE HEART OF A FOREST

I do not pretend to be teaching you anything at all. I will say nothing you do not already know; but I will, perhaps, say it in a different order. You do not need to be told that a poet is not always incapable of solving a rule of three, or that a logician is not always incapable of seeing in words something other than concepts, categories, and mere pretexts for syllogisms.

On this point I would add this paradoxical remark: if the logician could never be other than a logician, he would not, and could not, be a logician; and if the poet were never anything but a poet, without the slightest hope of being able to reason abstractly, he would leave no poetic traces behind him. I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.

-from Poetry of Abstract Thought

BECKETT on HAND HOLDING

COME AND GO (1965)

FLETCHER on THE SESTET

Take the number six. It is the first so-called perfect number. Six is the number of sides to each cell in that perfect housing complex--the bee's honeycomb. Six is the number of points of all snowflakes--the "silent syllables" of snow, Longfellow called them. There is an infinite number of snowflakes, each different from every other, and yet all have six points. They embody the scalar perfection of six. This is a perfect number because both the sum and the product of its parts yield a six: 1+2+3=6, or 1X2X3=6. The second perfect number is 28: 1+2+4+7+14=28, and the same holds for the factors as divisors. The learned scholar of Indo-Muslim antiquity, Annemarie Schimmel, reminds us not only of the powerful religious symbolisms adhering to the lunar 28 (with its internal 7s), but oddly that all the cells of the skin are regenerated and replaced every 28 days.

-from Angus Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2004)

The late painter Larry Day on act 4 of King Lear

Titian, "The Flaying of Marsyas", 1575

Marcus on Influence

Today, students in my creative influence seminar discussed parts of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, which attempts to trace The Sex Pistols' influences from Situationist International back to the Knights of the Round Table and an Islamic Gnostic.

A particularly inspiring moment from Marcus' epilogue:

"If onjavascript:void(0)e can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other's existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not."