In my serpentine researches
I came on a book review in Poetry
which began, with sublime assurance,
a comprehensive air of majesty,“The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom; languageso twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.”
I was never altogether the same man after that.
John Berryman, “Olympus”
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”, in Four Quartets
You swim with people then get out of the water, and you’re really with them, when you’re wet and drying off. The sun on you, drying up. Like being in a dream together. Moving between elements with someone, that’s special.
Harriet Clark, The Hill, in Dan Piepenbring, “New Books”
What is the difference between light and lighting? There is an etching called The Three Crosses by Rembrandt. It is a picture of the earth and the sky and the Calvary. A moment rains down on them, the plate grows darker. Darker. Rembrandt wakens you just in time to see matter stumble out of its forms.
Anne Carson, “Short Talk on the End”, in Short Talks
Lucian Freud’s art, whatever its merits, contains within itself the fundamental limitation of misogyny, which is a form of partial sight, a handicap with precise consequences if you happen to be a portraitist whose subjects are often women. For example, the Celia Paul whom Freud believed he saw, whom he set out to paint[, …] was not really the person lying before him. This is not to claim that Freud’s portraits are either ‘wrong’ (whatever such a word could be mean in this context) or even bad, but simply that they are notably partial, being blind to so much; indeed, to the essential quality of the subject in question. Freud thought he saw it all, purely, clearly, without distortion—that was his fame.
But when it came to women, he did not see. Misogyny, whatever else it might be, is a form of distortion, a way of not seeing, of assuming both too much and too little.
Zadie Smith, “The Muse at Her Easel”, in Dead and Alive: Essays
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.
Walker Percy, in Geoff Dyer, introduction to Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints
At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love each other without knowing much about it.
Albert Camus, The Plague
“I suppose,” he began, once there was a cup of tea for each of us on the cocktail table between our chairs, “that I’m writing this in my late style.” He wasn’t reading from pages, as he had before. It took me a moment to realize that he was counting on the notebook that I thought it had been my idea to bring. I started scribbling. “My very latest! I’ve never been entirely sure what late style is supposed to be. A conscious simplicity—digging a channel in the hope that its sides will contain the yaw that cognitive decay knocks into the boat? Or is it the resignation that an older artisan is likely to feel about the familiarity of his tools? The overfamiliarity. I imagine a pianist, at the end of her career, thinking, Oh, just these notes, then? There aren’t any others in the keyboard, by any chance? But it’s not notes, exactly, I don’t think, that she would be getting tired of. Any more than it would be words for a novelist. Or for a philosopher, for that matter. I think it’s more likely to be phrases, for a musician. Or ways of shaping phrases. And characteristic moves, for a philosopher. Logical and, as it were, procedural moves. Moves in the game. Maybe what’s meant by late style is that one gets tired of one’s own manner, of the little ways of solving the little problems, ways that have become so habitual they no longer feel chosen—ways of opening an inquiry, say—sidling up to it or attacking it head-on—whatever your personal predilection happens to be—and instead of finding new ways, instead of experimenting the way a young person does, you accept the familiarity, accept the simplicity of not choosing, and make an effort to attack a new problem, or maybe an old problem, of greater scope, using the old ways of solving as tools. At its best, anyway, that’s what I think late style would be.”
Caleb Crain, “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk About Death Is Funny”
[W]hat of progress? Well, I put it to you that The Known World is neither a progression nor a devolution from Macbeth, no more than the music of Stevie Wonder is a devolution from or an advance upon, say, the work of Beethoven. Unlike science and technology, art is not subject to the logic of growth or Moore’s law. It won’t definitely get smaller or faster or bigger and more lethal. It is produced in strong and weak economies alike, during war and peace. When it is good, as [E. M.] Forster notes, it will tend to outlast the human disorders that surround it, but it doesn’t get any better or worse at doing that. The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret [Edward P.] Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.
Zadie Smith, “Art for Our Sakes”
Although theater is not a form that [Ben] Lerner has seemed particularly conversant with in the past, Transcription feels like a step towards drama. It is by far his shortest novel—a short novel by anyone’s standards—and much of it is dialogue. Each of its claustrophobic acts is named after a hotel, as if the story were being staged in traditional, walled settings. Shortly after arriving at the Hotel Providence, the narrator notices that the building is situated across the street from a church that once hosted an experimental theater space. He saw a play there as an undergraduate […] and, in the present, he is “distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play.” Later, Thomas asks the narrator for reassurance that he is recording [their interview]. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural,” he says. “We will sound like bad actors. Even the transcript will show that we have rehearsed.”
Hannah Gold, “The World’s Worst Journalist”
Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. […] In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t spoken yet to whom? How on earth is this going to end?
Joanna Biggs, “Enter Man”
Short Talks is the moment before [Anne] Carson moves from portraying lyric mindstage to staging encounters between and among characters. In light of this trajectory Autobiography of Red’s Geryon was a revelation. This enactment of character and voice did not only occur in Carson’s own poetic fictions; her contemporized translation of Greek tragic plays corrupt those delineations that so often fence off lyric poetry from fiction and drama.
Over the past decades Carson has shown us how to pull very old poetry up through the crust of very new poetry. Her body of writing is renowned for its original, pithy, unruly theatricization of anticipation, desire, insight, terror, shame and resistance. The window frames have exploded: the profuse leakage, onslaught of fire and lava, appears formally alongside something brutally reconstructive in Carson’s present work, all of it engined by the evolution of discernible characters involved in some quotidian, occult, intensely private and profusely choral encounter with perception and mortality.
Margaret Christakos, introduction to Anne Carson, Short Talks
Sixty-six times have these eyes
beheld the changing scene of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars
when no wind stirs.