Quote: Katrina Vandenberg...

... the author of Atlas writes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in a great article about putting together a book of poems, this prosaic yet perfectly succinct summary of what a poem is:

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition.

Quote: Arundhati Roy

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

-- Arundhati Roy

My kind of people, poets are

The NewsHour just aired a series of profiles, "Poetry of the Middle East," over the past two days, featuring Israeli and Palestinian poets, respectively. It made me interested in reading more of their work, each of them.
It also reminded me why I'm glad I chose this profession (or rather, this way of life, since I guess "profession" implies a livelihood.) But these are the people I want to be counted among, or with whom, I guess, I feel most kinship, far beyond tribe and creed.

Some quotes:

GHASSAN ZAQTAN (through translator): I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I feel that's not my place. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse. That's my attitude.

AHARON SHABTAI: The world is big, and there are many big things, and poetry is tiny. But this tiny thing, it's like a small knife that you have in your pocket. But this is something that can say very important things.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

(And that last is profoundly good advice, summing up the crucial trick that I'd been trying to find words for recently.)

You Write What You Read

So Alexander Chee, in this BookSense article, quotes his former professor, Annie Dillard, as saying.

So right now, I'm reading two of the latest Yale Series of Younger Poets winners. Well, they just happen to have been chosen for an award which some of us still under 40 would not decline if offered (to say the least) but Louise Gluck, the current series editor, has my kinda taste in poetry, the kind that she finds living up to Emily Dickinson's definition of poetry a bit more than does some of today's pretty, well-behaved verse:

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

Speaking of milestones/ deadlines, I just read this quote from Virginia Woolf, from a letter or journal:

"There's no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."

At 33, I'm not sure if I should take heart from that or despair, but I guess if I could write like Virginia Woolf, I'd be willing to wait another seven years, at least.

The titles I'm reading now are Jay Hopler's Green Squall and Richard Siken's Crush.