04.06.24

“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.”
—Oscar Wilde
from the Preface to Dorian Gray

Elisha Pope Fearing Gardner: the “poet” of “Poets Korner” sold peanuts and verses (photographer unknown)

torn apart book

03.18.24

“The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.”
—Robert Walser
from Selected Stories

web find, creator unknown

it would take too long

07.10.21

“You can't tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can't tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.”
—Lydia Davis
from "Our Trip"

Daido Moriyama - Memory (2012 publication date)

even a small one

04.08.21

“The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.”
—widely attributed to David Lynch
original context unclear

From LIFE magazine - photographer unknown

sterility

03.25.21

"It would not be adequate even to say that the sterility of literary production is responsible for the sterility of criticism. The real reason for that sterility is the neutralization of culture, which points ahead like houses accidentally spared by the bombs and in whose substantiality no one really believes anymore. In this culture the critic who does not call the culture by its name necessarily becomes its accomplice and falls prey to the irrelevance of his objects, in which the historical forces of the age may appear in the material but hardly ever form the basis of the artistic substance."
—Theodor W. Adorno
from the appendix of Notes to Literature, Volume 2

web find — attribution unknown

the revulsion of literature toward the state

03.01.21

"Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite."
—Joseph Brodsky
from "Footnote to a Poem" in the collection Less than One

Ai Weiwei, second panel of the triptych "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" 1995/2009

I Am (K)Not the Body

02.12.21

"Reality is simply the loss of ego."
—Ramana Maharshi
from I Am (K)Not the Body
(notes taken by Pradeep Apte on Ramana Maharshi's sayings, as recorded by Muruganar and translated by David Godman)
Monsieur by Benoit Courti

the latest development of the organic

01.20.21

"Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong."
—Friedrich Nietsche
from The Gay Science
One of a series of photographs of the astronaut John Glenn
taken by an automatic sequence motion picture camera during his
flight on "Friendship 7." Glenn was in a state of weightlessness
traveling at 17,500 mph as these pictures were taken.

Art does not reproduce what we see

01.08.21

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”
— widely attributed to Paul Klee
original context unclear

Rudy Burckhardt, A View From Brooklyn II, 1954

almond blossoms radiate

12.29.20

“How can almond blossoms radiate in my language when I’m an echo?”
—Mahmoud Darwish
from “To Describe Almond Blossoms”
(trans. Fady Joudah)

attribution unknown

things outlast us

10.22.20

“Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experience they have had with us inside them and are—in fact—the book of our history opened before us.”
—W.G. Sebald
from Campo Santo, 2003
(trans. Anthea Bell)

Shomei Tomatsu - Statue of an angel shattered by the atomic bomb
at Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki, 1961.

a universe of qualities

10.08.20

“Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.”
—Clark Coolidge
from his contributor's note to Paul Carroll's anthology The Young American Poets, 1968

First page of Vladimir Nabokov’s first draft of Invitation to a Beheading

Poetry's Impulse

09.19.20

“Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons as such are hierarchical) or to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence. To this totality poetry appeals, and its appeal is the opposite of a sentimental one; sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible. Apart from reassembling by metaphor, poetry reunites by its reach. It equates the reach of a feeling with the reach of the universe; after a certain point the type of extremity involved becomes unimportant and all that matters is its degree; by their degree alone extremities are joined.”
—John Berger
from “Dream,” in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1982

Simone Leuck - Cuba TV Series

task failed successfully

08.28.20

“When shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin?”
—Kenneth Grahame
from “Marginalia,” in Pagan Papers, 1898

attribution unknown

addicted to stories

06.29.20

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories."
—Jonathan Gottschall
from The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Catherine Deneuve in Jaques'Demi's Donkey Skin (1971)

a dry psyche is most skilled

03.10.20

“The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of fine particles that give rise to all other things, particles of less mass than any other sustance and constantly in motion: only movement can know movement. . . . The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet. . . . A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue. . . . A drunk man, staggering and mindless, must be led home by his son, so wet is his psyche.”
—Heraclitus
from "I Have Looked Diligently at My Own Mind"
(trans. Guy Davenport)

attribution unknown

I'm afraid I've caught poetry

03.01.20




Dennis Moore (customer) and John Cleese (shopkeeper) in a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, ca. 1973.

everything has already been said

02.21.20

"Everything has already been said, but since nobody listens, we must continually start again."
—André Gide
from Le traite du Narcisse
(my translation)

Early emoticons in the American humor magazine Puck in 1881.
Interesting related article here.

willfully in public

02.10.20

“A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.”
—widely attributed to Edna St. Vincent Millay
original context unclear

Melanie Bourget – The Antidote

let us read and let us dance

01.12.20

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world."
—Voltaire
from The Portable Philosophical Dictionary

Allan Ginsberg dancing

bunch of idiots

09.16.19

“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."
—Thomas Mann
from a 1929 speech reprinted in Essays of Three Decades

André Breton at a Dada festival in Paris, March 27, 1920, wearing a slogan by Francis Picabia that says: "In order to love something you need to have seen and heard it for a long time bunch of idiots"

human consciousness

07.01.19

“Human consciousness: is it the projector
or the screen?”
—Dean Young
from "I Am But A Traveler in This Land & Know Little of Its Ways"

attribution unknown but possibly «Fotograf i model'» by Aleksey Andreyev

he who hides his madman

06.30.19

“He who hides his madman, dies voiceless.”
—Henri Michaux
from “My Properties”

Source unclear—possibly a clip from a performance by the Licedei Clown Troupe (Soviet, 1960's)

one mind's imagining into another

05.08.19

“One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another.”
—John Keats
from his marginalia in Paradise Lost

Wooden sculpture of a monk's head bearing an inscription on the interior, Japan, 1328 from Sign, Image, Symbol (ed. George Kepes)

all those commas

04.29.19

“You mean that’s your idea of desire, with all those commas?”
—Michael Palmer
from “Idem 1"

attribution unknown

you say my way of thinking cannot be tolerated?

03.20.19

“You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being, the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of, is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness—it means more to me than my life itself. ”
—Marquis de Sade
from a letter written to his wife while he was in prison, as quoted in Portrait of De Sade by Walter Lennig

Photograph by Anya Teixeira of Lindsay Kemp performing in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

most people know what a story is until

03.05.19

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
—Flannery O’Connor
from The Habit of Being (collected letters)

Carolee Schneemann – still from "Up to and Including Her Limits," 1976

no greater agony

02.26.19

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
—Maya Angelou
from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Dress sculpture by Louise Richardson

until it shines

01.16.19

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
—widely attributed to Emily Dickinson
original context unclear

Carl Andre – foot 1963

usefulness from what is not there

01.02.19

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.


Cut doors and windows for a room;


It is the holes which make it useful.


Therefore benefit comes from what is there;


Usefulness from what is not there.
—Lao Tzu
from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11

Belma Arslan - Afoot

literature is love

12.04.18

"To begin with, let us take the following motto... Literature is love. Now we can continue."
—Vladimir Nabokov
from Despair

Flannery O'Connor as a girl, reading, 
via the Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College & State University

mistranslations result in beauty

11.16.18

"Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty."
—Marcel Proust
as quoted by Gilles Deleuze in Dialogues II

Julius Kirchner, 1914
Blind children studying the hippopatamus

transforming milk

0.30.18

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”
—Italo Calvino
from Six Memos for the Next Millennium

An annotated photograph by Allen Ginsberg of the artist Harry Smith "transforming milk into milk," 1985

nothing, really, dies

09.29.18

"In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies."
Nicholas Rombes
from The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - from the series
The Temptation of Saint Anthony

to gain your own voice

09.09.18

"To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard."
—widely attributed to Allen Ginsberg
original context unclear

Friederike Pezold - Mundwerk, 1974-1975

small objects

08.19.18

My contemporaries like small objects, 
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea, 
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards 
sent from vanished cities, 
and blackened with illegible script, 
in which they discern words 
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.” 
They marvel at dormant volcanoes. 
They don’t desire light.
—Adam Zagajewski
"Small Objects" (trans. Clare Cavanagh)

Christo and Jeanne Claude - Package, 1958
Photo by Eava Inkeri

what is a poet?

08.03.18

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ - that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
—Søren Kierkegaard
from Either/Or

Nil Yalter - The Headless Woman or the Belly Dancer, 1974