The Universal Verse of the Universe

... too busy ... not in the mood ... couldn't get on the computer ... one reason or another, anyway, to explain the lull in posting.

Here, then, a series of quotations gleaned from the notebooks & which will feed into the poetry teaching this semester.

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Tide-flow under the sun and moon of the sea, systole and diastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience and when we let them take over our speech there is a monotonous rapture of persistent regular stresses and waves of lines breaking rhyme after rhyme. (Robert Duncan)

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There is not a phase of our experience that is meaningless, not a phrase of our communication that is meaningless. We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work towards an awareness of meaning; poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work. (Robert Duncan)

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The materials of the poem – the vowels and consonants – are already structured in their resonance, we have only to listen and cooperate with the music we hear. (Robert Duncan)

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All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song ... The Greeks fabled Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner ... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. (Thomas Carlyle)

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A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. (William Carlos Williams)

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In writing I’m telling something to myself, curiously, that I didn’t have the knowing of previously. (Robert Creeley)

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Poems are very specific kinds of dancing, because language is that possibility most specific to our condition as human beings. But I do not speak easily of these things … It is as though I were trying to make actual a sense of wetness apart from water itself. (Robert Creeley)

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What emerges in the writing I most value is a content which cannot be anticipated, which “tells you what you don’t know”.
(Robert Creeley)

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And a poem can be assay(s) of things come upon, can be a stretch of thinking.
(Larry Eigner)

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A poem must be a holiday of Mind
(Paul Valery)

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