i.
The way toward the true value of all works of art goes through solitude. To surround oneself with a book, with a painting, with a song, for two or three days, to become familiar with its habits and to trace its oddities, to gain confidence in it, to earn its trust, and to experience something together with it, no matter what: a grief, a dream, a longing.
ii.
How much I have grown to like this "Lorenzo de' Medici", whom I have read in Poggio a Caiano, in Florentine churches, at the ocean's edge and deep in the evening of the pine woods. - Always opened at random with indiscriminate grip. The way one leaves meadows and steps into a forest, anywhere. At every place he was an intimate.
That is how one should read all books of poetry. Along the border, a short way into the woods and then back into the summer sun. Then each will retain its own significance: the coolness, the scent, the splendour.
(Rilke, The Florence Diary)
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
2 comments:
That's a great quote. Don't think I've come across the Florence diary. I'm inspired to dig out my Letters to a Young Poet, although a quick scan of the shelves reveals them to be missing -- does this happen to you or are you a very tidy shelver? Mine get in a complete mess & I can see I'm going to have to spend half a day reordering everything...
But anyway, in the light of your previous comments about "bird migration patterns, ripples from water droplets, leaf skeletons..." etc., I just have to ask if you've ever come across THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: THE BIOLOGICAL ROOTS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by Humberto R Maturana and Francisco J Varela? It's one of the weirdest "textbooks" I've ever come across -- well worth a look. It seems like a children's book (including caricatures of the authors), but reads like A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.* Very odd. The authors describe it as "a complete outline for an alternative view of the biological roots of understanding . . . we will propose a way of seeing cognition not as a representation of the world 'out there', but rather as an ongoing bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself."
W.
* In fact, I came across it through Guattari's use of their term "autopoiesis", but that's another story... Autopoietic organisation means that living beings are continually self-producing . . . That the word was inspired by poiesis (creation, production) makes me feel it must have some application to poetry, if only one had the time to apply it!
Humberto R Maturana and Francisco J Varela - ordered! The sort of book Robert Duncan would have devoured I imagine.
Bookshelves - upstairs (where the really Good Stuff is to be found) pretty well arranged; bedroom (the current reading) depressing in the way things pile up until I have to have a spring clean and re-think; downstairs (mostly fiction) chaos due to the girls' bits and pieces being stuffed on every available shelf; attic (Critical Theory & Things I'm not going to read or re-read for a while) hard to access due to boxes and suitcases and old vinyl.
A while ago I bit the bullet and chucked out decades' worth of TLS and LRBs which I had carried from one house to another. (When I came to Brussels the removal men nearly broke their backs). That felt virtuous.
Let's say once a month I 'lose' a book - am adamant I know where I put it - blame wife/kids/anyone & everyone else - and then (as if by magic) it reappears! A book elf in the vicinity, no doubt.
Same with CDs - right now I am trying to trace my Gil Evans plays the music of Jimi Hendrix. (You'll be aware that Miss Mabry is a re-working of Little Wing).
As for the state of the interior of my skull ...
Am starting to think more than half-heartedly about the book idea.
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