"A Mexican Guitar" by Frank O'Hara

Actors with their variety of voices

and nuns, those arch campaign-managers,

were pacing the campo in contrasting colors

as Jane and I muttered a red fandango.

A cloud flung Jane's skirt in my face

and the neighborhood boys saw such sights

as mortal eyes are usually denied. Arabian day!

she clicked her rhinestone heels! vistas of lace!

Our shouting knocked over a couple of palm trees

and the gaping sky seemed to reel at our mistakes,

such flashing purple insteps and careers

which bit with lavish envy the northern soldiers.

Then loud startling deliberation! Violet peered,

hung with silver trinkets, from an adobe slit,

escorted by a famished movie star, beau idéal!

crooning that dejected ballad, "Anne the Strip."

"Give me back my mink!" our Violet cried

"and cut out the heroics! I'm from Boston, remember."

Jane and I plotz! what a mysteriosabelle!

the fandango died on our lips, a wintry fan

And all that evening eating peanut paste and onions

we chattered, sad, of films and the film industry

and how ballet is dying. And our feet ached. Violet

burst into tears first, she is always in the nick of time.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything. - Walt Whitman

New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods - and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins? - Andrew Piper

Letter from Pound to Eliot

Why dunt you NEVER talk TURKEY
                                                   I don't mind earning the rent, but whazz use of a letter all full of irrelevance. If I interrupt the flow of soul, life of reason, luminous effulgence of internal mediatation, stop playin tennis against Palmieri and in general lower the TONE of the tenor of my life, I gotter be PAID.
                                                   Why don't you say / will you do IO quid worth of hack work?
                                                   I mean if that's what you do mean. and say how many pages of typescript is necessary to keep the goddam M. 1 Econome from shaving off the last 8/ and 3d. I take it all I gotter do is to talk about Britches, not necessarily read the ol petrification?
                                         so DO be specific / Rabbit Britches indeed!!!
                    whaaar he git the plagazization of Rabbit aza name ANYHOW//
and as it we. stop my doing an article already begun on three blokes that aren't yet mortician's, I spose I cd. be aloud to make an occasional confronto between Britches' dulness and the serious unreadability of a few blokes that would write if they could, but at any rate don't pretend, like the buzzardly [lacuna]
proposed title of the article
                              Testicles versus Testament
           an embalmsamation of the Late Robert's Britches.
all the pseudo rabbits / Rabbit Brooks, Rabbit Britches / whot-ter hell / your own hare or a wig sir???
I spose I can cite the what I once said of Britches?
I managed to dig about IO lines of Worse Libre out of one of his leetle bookies. ONCT.
and then there iz the side line of Hupkins / couldn't you send and / or loan. In fact the pooplishers OUGHT to donate a Hup-kins, and the Pubkins LETTERS so az to treate Britches properly.
bak ground for an articl that wen't be as DULL oh bloodily as merely trying to yatter about wot be WROTE
Something ought certaintly to be done to prevent the sale of Oxford Press publications / thaaaar I AM wiff yuh.
and now getting to BIZNIZ / whatter bout that vullum of ez/?
who iza sleeink in THAT.
       and PUTSCH to the last degree. . . .

- Ezra Pound in Rapallo writing to T.S. Eliot in London in 1936 in response to Eliot's invitation to contribute an article on Robert Bridges to The Criterion.

"Borodin" by Donald Revell

When the world was loveliness I was

A composer, Borodin, my left eye

Level with the floor beside toy men.

Wild work and havoc they made,

Being glad. I could draw a line

Would run straight through the minds of men,

Being a sociable angel,

Music before and after, blushing.

Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible.

I was a child on the floor beside you,

Making music, becoming small in the rosy

Embrace of God’s best messenger.

I loved your havoc and your hair.

Bach: an argument for technology

     Our lives are half-lives, our experience mediated, and so diminished, by technology. So we are told by our age’s best and brightest; and the literature of the varieties of media experience has all the traits of the literature of religious experience, an account of the adept’s valiant struggle with our fallen state - of the struggle to stay afloat in the sea of artifice, the polluted data-stream.
     To this conviction, the recorded music of Bach is contrary testimony. It defies the argument that experience mediated by technology is a diminished thing.
     That is my own experience, at any rate. Though it has come, in my case, almost completely through recordings, this experience of Bach is as rich an encounter as one could hope for in a lifetime. It is as direct, as real, as the experience of a young woman learning to play the piano in a mining town in the Rockies, or a dangling man going about the streets of the city with a song in his heart. It is the thing itself - and often the experience feels more real than the rest of life, not less so.
     And what is the experience? It is an experience that the movement of the music into new formats calls forth and makes obvious. It is of music and art as life’s counterpoint - a presence at the center of our lives, at once personal and objective, that enables us to make sense of the world and our place in it, enriching our lives and helping us to understand them. - Paul Elie

I am not an artist. - Van Gogh

There is a saying of Gustave Dore's which I have always admired, “J'ai la patience d'un bœuf,” I find a certain goodness in it, a certain resolute honesty - in short, that saying has a deep meaning, it is the word of a real artist. When one thinks of the man from whose heart such a saying sprang, all those oft-repeated art dealer's arguments about “natural gifts” seem to become an abominably discordant raven's croaking. “J'ai la patience” - how quiet it sounds, how dignified; they wouldn't even say it except for that very raven's croaking. I am not an artist - how coarse it sounds - even to think so of oneself - oughtn't one to have patience, oughtn't one to learn patience from nature, learn patience from seeing the corn slowly ripen, seeing things grow - should one think oneself so absolutely dead as to imagine that one would not grow any more? Should one thwart one's own development on purpose? I say this to explain why I think it so foolish to speak about natural gifts and no natural gifts. But in order to grow, one must be rooted in the earth. - Vincent van Gogh

Henry Green on Prose

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.

Mary Ruefle on John Ashbery's Three Poems

I remember my first Ashbery reading, also in college. Ashbery was reading from his new book, Three Poems, and he said that it was a lot like watching TV—you could open the book anywhere and begin reading, and flip around the book as much as you wanted to. I remember hating him for saying this. I remember the word sacrilege came to mind. I remember not liking that reading.

I remember, two years later, reading Three Poems on a grassy slope while across the road three men put a new roof on an old house, and I was in love with one of them. I could watch the men working as I read. I remember that everything I was reading was everything that was happening across the way—I would read a little, then look up, read a little, then look up, and I was blown apart by the feeling this little book was about my life at that moment, exactly as I was living it. I remember loving the book, and that it was one of the memorable reading experiences of my life. - Mary Ruefle

"The Mango Tree" by Hart Crane / Comment by Donald Revell

                           The Mango Tree

Let them return, saying you blush again for the great
Great-grandmother. It’s all like Christmas.
     When you sprouted Paradise a discard of chewing-gum 
took place. Up jug to musical hanging jug just gay spiders 
yoked you first, – silking of shadows good underdrawers for 
owls.
     First-plucked before and since the flood, old hypnotisms 
wrench the golden boughs. Leaves spatter dawn from emerald 
cloud-sprockets. Fat final prophets with lean bandits crouch:
the dusk is close
                                      Under your noon,
                                      you Sun-heap whose
ripe apple-lanterns gush history, recondite lightnings, irised.
                                      O mister Señor
                                      missus Miss
                                      Mademoiselle
                                      with baskets
                                                    Maggy, come on

I love to remember the sweet perplexity and then the buoyancy I felt when first I read "The Mango Tree." Here is the purity of child's play in its full maturity. Risibly Rimbaldian in its references to Christmas and the flood and, via those golden boughs, glad to blow a raspberry at its abandoned high modernism, "The Mango Tree" is nevertheless instantly far beyond or far above satire in its immediate permissions: "Let them return"; there's a further paradise in a wad of gum. And there the wonderful hyphens (as in "cloud-sprockets" and "apple-lanterns") spell a new technology of the sacred, as simple, as portable, as freely inclusive as "baskets." A pure poem is unresisting in its inclusiveness, having excluded from itself the arguments that tether its figures to figures of speech. So quickly, "The Mango Tree" accomplishes a sun-drenched purity equal to the most beautiful passages in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons yet free of that great book's programmatic emphases. "Maggy, come on" is a summons to new circumstance where the poem says, and needs to say, no more.

A poem like and unlike a prayer

What, then, is the difference between a poem and a prayer? It depends on what is meant by prayer. There is prayer and prayer (pace Gertrude Stein). If it’s the sort of prayer that is a kind of plea bargain and assumes an auditor who is capable of answering the prayer, or the pleader wants something material to ensue as a result, then it is nothing like a poem. But insofar as the poet must relinquish a certain kind of control, and attain a kind of self-forgetfulness; must, as the ancients had it, call in the Goddess, the Muse, the power of the imagination - that which must be invited and cannot be commanded - in that sense, in which prayer involves a humbling and earnest entreaty for vision, and creative deepening of perception toward a kind of ease of being, then ok, the difference begins to fade.

- Eleanor Wilner

The best acts of reading are acts of incompletion

The key issue here is the sense of what cannot be analyzed or explained. A major act of interpretation gets nearer and nearer to the heart of the work, and it never comes too near. The exciting distance of a great interpretation is the failure, the distance, where it is helpless. But its helplessness is dynamic, is itself suggestive, eloquent and articulate. The best acts of reading are acts of incompletion, acts of fragmentary insight, of that which refuses paraphrase, metaphrase; which finally say, “The most interesting in all this I haven't been able to touch on.” But which makes that inability not a humiliating defeat or a piece of mysticism but a kind of joyous invitation to reread. - George Steiner

Martin Amis on Aging

Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin, but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.

Situations under which my writing would be less bourgeois

If I hadn’t the money to eat as much as I wanted;

If I had been sectioned;

If I didn’t have a house;

If I were uncomfortable with my sexuality;

If I were suffering religious persecution;

If I were woefully inarticulate;

If I were not allowed to go ice-skating every morning;

If I were a prisoner of the state;

If I were interested in disrupting the relationship between writer and reader;

If I expunged capital letters and punctuation;

If I stopped trying to be funny;

If I were to go on a pilgrimage;

If my sole motivation were not vanity.

- Luke Kennard

"To disappear enhances --" by Emily Dickinson

To disappear enhances --

The Man that runs away

Is tinctured for an instant

With Immortality

But yesterday a Vagrant --

Today in Memory lain

With superstitious value

We tamper with "Again"

But "Never" far as Honor

Withdraws the Worthless thing

And impotent to cherish

We hasten to adorn --

Of Death the sternest function

That just as we discern

The Excellence defies us --

Securest gathered then

The Fruit perverse to plucking,

But leaning to the Sight

With the ecstatic limit

Of unobtained Delight --

On artists speaking about their work

It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases the tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of concepts evolved in terms of logic and words…the artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organises memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time. - Henry Moore