The Power of semicolons
read more in pg.2
When 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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party investor pivot. Metrics accelerator startup assets. Hypotheses mass market beta innovator series A
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OPINION: Not Every Poem is Finished
read more in pg.12
"In 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.”
"Roland 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."
"the least we can do is dignify our knowingness, the loss of some
vitality through familiarization"
“Easy Thing for a Painter to Say!”
read more in pg.14
The 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 Most Important Lesson for a Poet
read more in pg.5
Everyone knows that if you query poets about how their poems begin,
the answer is always the same: a phrase, a line, a scrap of language, a rhythm, an image, something seen,
heard, witnessed, or imagined. And the lesson is always the same, and young poets recognize this to be one of
the most important lessons they can learn: if you have any idea for a poem,
an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley,
at the top of a cliff you haven’t even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and
error. I believe many fine poems begin with ideas, but if you tell too many faces this, or tell it too
loudly, they will get the wrong idea.
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 miss finishing a novel and there on the last page, at a discrete distance from the last words of the last sentence, are the dark letters spelling The End.
It was its own thrill. I didn’t ignore them, I read them. (...)
The Creation of Tension
read more in pg.10
Barbara Henstein Smith, in her book Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, says this: “Perhaps all we can
say, and even this may be too much, is that varying degrees or states of tension seem to be involved in all
our experiences, and that the most gratifying ones are those in which whatever tensions are created are also
released. Or, to use another familiar set of terms, an experience is gratifying to the extent that those
expectations that are aroused are also fulfilled.”
But there is no book I know of on the subject of how poems
begin. How can the origin be traced when there is no form or shape that precedes it to trace? It 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.
I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures,
across aesthetic schools,
and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even
repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain
remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And i began to realize, reading
these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each
speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to use by others, by those we
listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem
I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night
after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I
encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you.
I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.
"But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising."
"In 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.” - Mary
Ruefle
What Ezra Pound Learned from Ernest Fenollosa
read more in pg.13
Now here is something really interesting (to me), something 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. This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some Languages
are so constructed—English among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime.
Thatsentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before
you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. Or, if you are
blessed, they are heard by someone who knows you and loves you and will be sorry to hear the sentence end.
The Poet Mission
read more in pg.3
Paul Valéry, the French poet and thinker, once said that no poem is ever ended, that every poem is merely
abandoned.