The beginnings

OPINION: NOT EVERY POEM IS FINISHED
"I
n life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings: no one has yet to begin a life who will not end it.  In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it. Not every poem is finished—one poem is abandoned, another catches fire and is carried away by the wind, which may be an ending, but it is the ending of a poem without an end.”

The most important lesson for a poet
I
f you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley
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"I will tell you what I miss!"
I
miss watching a movie and at the end, huge scrolled words come on the screen and say: The End. (...)I have never, in my life, read a poem that ended with the words The End. Why is that, I wonder.

THE MISSION OF A POET
P
aul Valéry, the French poet and thinker, once said that no poem is ever ended, that every poem is merely abandoned.

THE LIFE TIME SENTENCE
S
omething you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million three-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-five words used by the Esimo for snow.

WILL THE END HAVE THE FINAL WORD?
"R
oland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing: the ending will have the last word or the ending will be silent or the ending will execute a pirouette, do something unexpectedly incongruent."

Poets love possibilities
"I
n the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in the beginning was the Act.

THE POWER OF SEMICOLONS
W
hen I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: “That’s a lot of semicolons!” he is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon, you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing.

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Admiration and disappointment
"T
he moment of admiration is the experience of something unfiltered, vital and fresh—it could also be horror" - Gaston Bachelard

"EASY FOR A PAINTER TO SAY"
"T
he painter Cy Twombly quotes John Crowe Ransom, on a scrap of paper: “The image cannot be disposed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.”
Easy and appropriate thing for a painter to say. Cy Twombly uses text in some of his drawings and paintings, usually poetry, usually Dante. Many men and women have written long essays and lectures on the ideas they see expressed in Twombly’s work.

The creation of tension
I
t is exactly like tracing the moment of the big bang—we can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t “know” anything before “knowing” itself was born.

AMOUNG EMILY DICKINSON'S LAST WORD
"B
ut it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson’s last words (in a letter). A woman whom everyone thought of as shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was.