Indie's Inanities

So, the question was: What gives you the right to write poetry? How do you start a poem? What do you have to say that is more interesting than the process of the paper's creation?

Nothing does, really. I write because I have to. In my life, only two things are imperative: to breathe, and to write. T.S. Eliot once said that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

I can't remember who said it, but one of my favorite poetry quotes says something along these lines:"A poet is someone who, in a lifetime of standing in out in thunderstorms, manages to get struck by lightning seven or eight times."

At the end of the day, I don't know what gives me the right to write poetry. I do know, however, that the desire to write it, for me, is insatiable. I am continuously compelled into some form of verbally constructing my life, my keen feelings, my moments of glory and agony, into something solid. Something I can wrap my mind around, and feel pour out of me onto the page. For me, in so many ways, writing poetry is a kind of exorcism. Of coping. Of reaction. Of catching the smoke of subconscious thought in my fingertips. It's gold-panning for the occasional eternal ideas that so often in life lie just beneath the surface of things.

If I cannot tell me to you in some distilled and simple way, how will you ever hope to know me?

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“The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.”

“I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to get rich.”

“The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.”

“If you can do it then why do it?”

“A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.”

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”

“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”

“Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.”

“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”

“There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.”

“What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?”

“When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.”

“A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.”

“Romance is everything.”

“Adventure is making the distant approach nearer
but romance is having what is where it is which is not
where you are stay where it is.”

“It does make a big difference, it is why Robin Hood lives,
crime if you know the reason if you know the motive
if you can understand the character if it is not a
normal one is not interesting a crime in itself is
not interesting it is only there and when it is there
everybody has to take notice of it. It is important
in that way but in every other way it is not
important.”

“It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.”

“... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.”

“Action and reaction are equal and opposite.”

“There are two kinds of liars the kind that lie and the kind that don’t lie the kind that lie are no good.”

“It is richly held
To be not all for it
Because
Idleness is no blessing”

“No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight.”

“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

“There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.”

“I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.”

“Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it.”

“When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well
that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and
dream.”

“Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.”

“... the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”

“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”

“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”

“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”

“It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.”

“Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.”

“Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five
thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from
anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I
could completely imagine his suffering and I replied
that five thousand Chinamen was something I could not
imagine and so it was not interesting. One has to
remember that about imagination, that is when the
world gets dull when everybody does not know what
they can or what they cannot really imagine.”

“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

“Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and
nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean,
nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you
have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you
mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great
many will have to realize that you know what you mean
and so they will agree that you mean what you know,
what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody
can come to understanding any one.”

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.... So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

“Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.”

“If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.”

“One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.”

“Sentences and paragraphs. Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is. I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.”

“Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.”

“Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing
with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring
with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
great many kinds of poetry.”

“The question mark is alright when it is all alone when it
is used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used
in decoration but connected with writing it is
completely entirely completely uninteresting.... A
question is a question, anybody can know that a
question is a question and so why add to it the
question mark when it is already there when the
question is already there in the writing.”

“When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun.”

“Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.”

“The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just.... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.”

“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”

"The essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation."

"If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master- piece is not."

"I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school."

"One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know."

"I know of only one mystical poem that is satisfactorily successful, The Obscure Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross. In that amazing poem, what is said counts for almost nothing, but is sublimated into the purposed significance. The artist does not intend to go so far as that, but in seeking an incorruptible unity, he is always something of a mystic. Unlike the mystic, he clings to the world of things, though he transmutes it. He can never say the whole of what he means, but the mystic cannot say at all what he means; for his meaning is something singular and indivisible, something absolute in its inexpressibility. The simple lover in Cyrano can only say “I love you,” but the poet Cyrano can say the same thing in a hundred elaborate ways."

"There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln."

"We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”"

"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."

"It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth."

"A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."

"Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better."

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."

"Time is the only critic without ambition."

"Adolescents sometimes say...”My friends listen to me, but my parents only hear me talk.” Often they are right. Familiarity breeds inattention."

"Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive."

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Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

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IndieGirl:

Oh, it's been tempting. So tempting this past week. But I will let it waver and settle in the amber of uncertainty until it becomes tepid and hard, and I can chip it out and throw it away. Or against something, watch it, too, shatter. Explosions into a thousand shards of each thing I tuck away with a doubt and a whimper. Some days I am amber-full, like an old tree, hoarding the pieces of things caught in my slow-to-change way. Maybe some day I'll find them again, and hold them up to the light, seeing them in a different way that the one they've settled in so comfortably now.

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IG:

I cannot help it. If it's asked, I will give it. But oh, the agony of spending so much of life giving away yourself with such unwilled, yet hapless, abandon, and then to wonder why it never seems returned to you in quite equal measure.

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Exploits in the Su-Dan:

Darth Chel Productions

Presents

"Exploits in the Su-Dan"

A Chelsea Meacham Short​

Dan:[ducking out of an impending argument] "Perhaps you're right, my little sha-wee-wee. I don't really understand you, but let's go do it."

Su: [in her Singapore apron, weilding large wooden spoon]"Pish tosh, you couldn't hope to understand me, my Lurplicious Manchild. I went to Japan on my mission. But I think doing it is a good idea, because you perplex me."

Dan:"Alright my Scottish Plum Blossom, then let's retire to the west wing of our ghastly orange love-nest and frighten the holy gosh out of your parents with the noises we make."

Su:"Marvelous idea, My Kung Fu Walking Stick, and afterwards I will make you curry potstickers and some stuffed curry mushrooms, and some coconut canteloupe curry sorbet. Do you mind if we name our first child Curry?"

Dan:"Dash it all, my Kilty Pleasure, I wanted to name our first child They Might Be A Giant Tiger. But if you'll still bed me, then I will consent."

Su:"Avast, I be thinkin' that's a good idea. Now come, my Cotton Swabbie, I be prepared fer boarding. And cookin' if there be enough ration in the galley. Are ye up fer a little roleplaying? I'll be Jeeves if you be Wooster..."

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