miracles

"It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles." - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear trans.)

vile

"I may be vile, but you must not be."

- Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Pevear & Volokhonsky

hostile

"I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry."

- John Berryman, from his National Book Award acceptance speech

berryman on teaching

INTERVIEWER

Well, that covers scholarship. How about teaching? Does teaching only get in the way of your work as a poet?

BERRYMAN

It depends on the kind of teaching you do. If you teach creative writing, you get absolutely nothing out of it. Or English—what are you teaching? People you read twenty years ago. Maybe you pick up a little if you keep on preparing, but very few people keep on preparing. Everybody is lazy, and poets, in addition to being lazy, have another activity which is very demanding, so they tend to slight their teaching. But I give courses in the history of civilization, and when I first began teaching here I nearly went crazy. I was teaching Christian origins and the Middle Ages, and I had certain weak spots. I was OK with The Divine Comedyand certain other things, but I had an awful time of it. I worked it out once, and it took me nine hours to prepare a fifty-minute lecture. I have learned much more from giving these lecture courses than I ever learned at Columbia or Cambridge. It has forced me out into areas where I wouldn't otherwise have been, and since I am a scholar, these things are connected. I make myself acquainted with the scholarship.

Suppose I'm lecturing on Augustine. My Latin is very rusty, but I'll pay a certain amount of attention to the Latin text in the Loeb edition, with the English across the page. Then I'll visit the library and consult five or six old and recent works on St. Augustine, who is a particular interest of mine, anyway. Now all that becomes part of your equipment for poetry, even for lyric poetry. The Bradstreet poem is a very learned poem. There is a lot of theology in it, there is a lot of theology in The Dream Songs. Anything is useful to a poet. Take observation of nature, of which I have absolutely none. It makes possible a world of moral observation for Frost or Hopkins. So scholarship and teaching are directly useful to my activity as a writer.

(This interview, done by Peter A. Stitt, appeared in the winter 1972 issue of The Paris Review, which can be read here.)

apprentices

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

home is not a place to spend wednesday afternoon

"It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon."

- Walker Percy, from Lost in the Cosmos

we defy augury

"Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
to leave betimes, let be."

- Shakespeare, from Hamlet 5.2.217-224

walker percy waxeth poetic on moses

"Explain why Moses was tongue-tied and stagestruck before his fellow Jews but had no trouble talking to God."

--Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

the courage to be

"The courage to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon oneself is the boundary line up to which the courage to be can go. Beyond it is mere non-being. Within it all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

- Paul Tillich, from The Courage to Be (1952).

Form is a father: when I looked for form,

I found a leaf, and on the leaf a worm.

- Theodore Roethke

from Straw for the Fire, pg. 89

jim harrison on sentiment in fiction

"I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass."

- Jim Harrison

when art becomes religion

"I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered--—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor."

- Woody Allen, interviewed by The Paris Review.

Read the whole interview here.

a poem you are unable to write

"You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest."
- John Berryman

just another wedding

This is from Jess Walter's The Zero, a 2006 National Book Award Finalist. I'm rereading the book for class, and this passage hit me hard, for some reason.

April's eyes narrowed then as if she were thinking the same thing. "So . . . do you ever think about what yours would say?

"My--" Remy opened his eyes.

"Your portrait in grief. They're not like obits--see. They're not resumes or tributes. They're more like crosscuts, a strobe flash on one part of your life. One moment. One theme. So what would yours say?"

"I don't know," Remy said.

"I know what mine would say."

"What?"

"She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to."

my favorite sage

"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
— Woody Allen

an artist and his words

"You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way."
— William Carlos Williams

"Before you are wild, you first have to be, not tame, but capable of being contained; or containing yourself, your psyche: that which is stored up."

- Theodore Roethke, from his notebooks.

a bridge

"The self must be a bridge, not a pit."

- Roethke, "Notebooks" (1945)

the worst possible ordeal

"I have . . . a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent. Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. . . . I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. . . . My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

- John Berryman ['The Art of Poetry XVI' Paris Review, winter 1972]

death

David Bazan, on death: "It's gonna fuckin' happen."