needful things

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Making a poem is making an object. 

I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. 

It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real.


—Αnne Carson
at Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival, 2016

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[T]here is nothing before language, for there is no consciousness, and therefore no world, without a system of signs. In fact, it is the speaking-being that has created this universe, even if language excludes him from it. This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is. 

We need poetry, not to regain this intimacy, which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.


—Yves Bonnefoy

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When the world arises in me, 
It is just an illusion: 
Water shimmering in the sun, 
A vein of silver in mother-of-pearl, 
A serpent in a strand of rope. 

From me the world streams out 
And in me it dissolves, 
As a bracelet melts into gold,
A pot crumbles into clay,
A wave subsides into water.


—Ashtavakra Gita 2: 9-10

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