Limited vision

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world – Arthur Schopenhauer; Psychological Observations: Parerga and Paralipomena

Vision

Was it perhaps in an imagined frame,
in the bottomless mirror of desire,
or was it divinely and simply in real life
that I saw you watch me sleep the other night?
In my alcove enlarged with loneliness and dread,
quietly, you appeared by my side,
like a gigantic mushroom, dead and alive,
budding in the corners of the night,
damp with silence,
glistening with shadow and with loneliness.

You bent supremely over me, as if
toward the crystal chalice of a lake
on the desert’s altar-cloth of fire;
you turned to me as one invalided by life
turns to his infallible opiates
and to the stony bandages of Death.

You leaned toward me in the way the believer
does toward the spotless oblation of the Host…
- Morsel of snow with the savour of stars
that feeds the lilies of mortal flesh,
spark of God to apotheosize the spirit -.
You leaned over me as the great willow
of Melancholy
does over the deep lagoons of silence;
you loomed over me as the marble
tower of Pride,
quarried by a monster of sadness,
does over the solemn sister of its own shadow…
You bent over me as if
my body were the majuscule initial of your fate
written on the dark page of my bed;
you leaned out over me as if toward the miracle
of a window open on the furthest beyond.
And even beyond all these you leaned!

And my glance was a snake
fanged between the bramble of eyelashes,
toward the reverent swan of your body.
And my lust was a snake
slipping between cliffs of shadow
toward the lily statue of your body.
Further you leaned, and further… and so far,
so far you leaned,
that my sexual flowers have doubled their size,
Your entire life is printed on mine…

Apprehensively I waited for the wing-beat
of the magnificent embrace; an embrace
of four arms that beatitude dresses
in fever and miracle; it may be flight!
And it may be that those enchanted arms
are four roots of a new race.

Apprehensively I waited for the wing-beat
of the magnificent embrace…
         And when
I opened my eyes to you like a soul, I saw
you edging backwards, wrapping yourself
in I know not what huge fold of darkness!

Delmira Agustini

submit to its vision

Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non-sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

Zadie Smith
Fail Better

that cinematic feel to my work

I’m a big visualizer. When I write, I tend to see each scene as a little movie in my head and then I sort of transcribe them from there. I can’t imagine that ever changing for me, so there will probably always be that cinematic feel to my work. I really hope someone adapts something I’ve written someday. It would be incredibly fascinating to see how a real screen version would compare to the version in my head.

Amber Fallon
Interview published in Nightmare, October 2018

something we once knew

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work — like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work…Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that ‘rarely glimpsed bright face behind / the apparency of things’? Here, I suppose,  we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: ‘Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it.  If thou do’st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.

P.K. Page
The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction

the rhyme changed my life

When I was 12, I wrote a poem that concluded in a very simple rhyme. The poem was nothing special but the rhyme changed my life. My parents were string quartet violinists; when I made that rhyme, I thought, This is my music…

I pretty much write all the time and don’t follow any particular routine or practice. I almost always write the first draft (or two or three) in longhand and move to a computer later; this is true for novels, as well as for poems. I write in spiral notebooks – grabbing whichever comes to hand, which means the same notebook may hold paragraphs from different stories and lines from various poems and a book review or essay. I would so love to be more systematic but I work on a lot of things at once and the result is, paper everywhere, with no way to organize it.

Writing in any form is a “journey of discovery”. Writing poetry is how I think, and learning what one thinks is terrifically exciting: That’s the journey, that’s the illumination. In any given poem, I want to make the idea of it as clear as possible -which is not to say an exposition but an unclouded vision.

I also have a great desire to include all kinds of things in my poetry; that is, to take on, in my poetry, different worlds, as in science, history, language, philosophy, visual art, music, religion, etc. I am interested in all these things, and it seems natural to me to want to write about them.

Kelly Cherry
Interview with Maureen Doallas for tweetspeak

a bridge across our fears

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde
Poetry Is Not a Luxury

their language signifies rapture

…the antient Bards…communicated nothing of their knowledge, butt by way of tradition: which I suppose to be the reason that we have no account left nor any sort of remains, or other monuments of their learning of way of living. As to the later Bards, you shall have a most curious Account of them. This vein of poetrie they called Awen, which in their language signifies rapture, or a poetic furore & (in truth) as many of them as I have conversed with are (as I may say) gifted or inspired with it.

I was told by a very sober, knowing person (now dead) that in his time, there was a young lad fatherless & motherless, soe very poor that he was forced to beg; butt att last was taken up by a rich man, that kept a great stock of sheep upon the mountains not far from the place where I now dwell who cloathed him & sent him into the mountains to keep his sheep. There in Summer time following the sheep & looking to their lambs, he fell into a deep sleep in which he dreamt, that he saw a beautifull young man with a garland of green leafs upon his head, & an hawk upon his fist: with a quiver full of Arrows att his back, coming towards him (whistling several measures or tunes all the way) att last lett the hawk fly att him, which (he dreamt) gott into his mouth & inward parts, & suddenly awaked in a great fear & consternation: butt possessed with such a vein, or gift of poetrie, that he left the sheep & went about the Countrey, making songs upon all occasions, and came to be the most famous Bard in all the Countrey in his time.

Henry Vaughan
Letter to his cousin the antiquary John Aubrey in 1694