MURIEL RUKEYSER ~ ON POETRY
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SYLVIA PLATH ~ ON POETRY
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ANNE SEXTON ~ POET OF THE SOUL
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MAGRITTE ~ ON POETRY
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ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK ~ MELANCHOLIC POET
“Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies”
Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) was an Argentine poet.
She was born on April 29, 1936 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Avellaneda, , a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. A year after entering the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry, La tierra más ajena (1955). Soon after, she studied painting with Juan Battle Planas. Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia (1956) and Las aventuras perdidas (1958).
From 1960 to 1964 Pizarnik lived in Paris. There she worked for the journal Cuadernos, sat on the editorial board of the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, and participated in the Parisian literary world.
She died in Buenos Aires of a self-induced overdose of seconal.
Source Wikipedia
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JEAN COCTEAU ~ ON BEING A POET
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On poetry, from Chaos to order (a graced completion of a circle between observer and observed) 1/20 Tom Sheldon
Take a poem and look very closely into it…the vowels, the letters. Study it closely….It probably can replicate itself (though not easy) you are my eyes. Directing your voice without distraction in it. Sense and feel the difference between the visual informational moments the image, the personality, the personal history, hurt, anger, etc. A separate reality more real than sun on skin, with the indefinite power of wind and stars. Far more reflective than a pond of still water, more substantial than a rock.
Poetry has allowed me to diffuse my fears, express disillusionment, and be heard. To differentiate between what the mind and the eyes see. To love long after the partner is gone, to mourn, to connect tickling and telling the reader the truth. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. Write for yourself and celebrate writing. It is one of the oldest most sacred connections with self. A ancestral journey through time from your eyes down the arm via the hand and pen onto paper then back through the eyes.
Poetry Reconciles Us to the World. Poetry has always possessed the deeper roots and the larger promise. The arts are not reductive, but seek pattern, order and consistency in the very midst of variety. Poetry may not change the world — much though Marxists insist that it should — but it can enable us to see life whole, with clarity and understanding. The great theatre of the world is written in language, and its poetry reconciles us to the manifest absurdities and cruelties of our natures.
Art can set aside the struggle for individual preeminence, said Schopenhauer, and learn to see life as it is directly given to us through timeless ideas.
Poetry makes the world more visible and can capture ‘wonder.’ Ordering thoughts and ideas, we choose our words with discernment and fit with a sense of proportion. Shadows are brought into the light echoes traced to their origin, muddied streams run clear again. Like following a trail to the summit like tracing a stream to find the source. Words, the travel sometimes level and easy the simple becoming difficult, the difficult easy. Words calming the hearts dark waters: dredging from the depths the proper name of things.
“From the eyes
to the mind
of the pen
down the arm
to the heart
of the hand
in the paper”
© Copyright Tom Sheldon
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SOMERSET MAUGHAM ~ ON POETRY
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FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA ~ THE POETRY OF SKYSCRAPERS
“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”
Federico Garcia Lorca
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DEAD POET’S SOCIETY ~ THE NEED OF POETRY
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
Dead Poet’s Society
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