Draw me in your footsteps, let us run.
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.”
—Mat Honan, from “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”
“Thus every moment of reading is a dialectic of protension and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both at the same time and leaves them to merge in its wake. There is no escaping this process, for—as has already been pointed out—the text cannot at any one moment, be grasped as a whole.”
—Wolfgang Iser, from The Act of Reading (1978)
“Language is formed along two planes, the lexical plane where the word selection is made and the intersecting plane where the words contract relations with other signs. In the intersection of these planes we have the linguistic event of the poem.”
—David Porter, from Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (1981)
The Coming Global Water Crisis
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, ne breath ne motion,
As idle as a painted Ship
Upon a painted Ocean.
Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Ne any drop to drink.
“This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s ‘annual global water requirements’ will exceed ‘current sustainable water supplies’ by forty percent.”
Poetry from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,the Making obsession has disadvantages;for instance,my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately,however,I should prefer to make almost anything else,including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives(and not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls)that my ‘poems’ are competing.
“Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is our,he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth(to be found,in abbreviated costume,upon the title page of the present volume).”
—e e cummings in the forward to is 5 (1926).
“We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely. We have a sense of upheaval. We feel threatened. We look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics… Resistance is the opposite of escape. The poet who wishes to contemplate the good in the midst of confusion is like the mystic who wishes to contemplate God in the midst of evil. There can be no thought of escape. Both the poet and the mystic may establish themselves on herrings and apples. The painter may establish himself on a guitar, a copy of Figaro and a dish of melons. These are fortifyings, although irrational ones. The only possible resistance to the pressure of the contemporaneous is a matter of herring and apples or, to be less definite, the contemporaneous itself. In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance.”
- Wallace Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (via lit-hum.org)
So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.
