Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world. ...

"... For writing is a graphic art, and a word projects either stroke or color. As it is born, a poem is drawn. It can begin with a figure or a line. It can begin to clothe a cartoon or about the idea of anything. It begins to paint itself. It can be made with a pencil or a knife, with a pen or a recorder, or with a keyboard contraption that strikes the paper. It requires patience, approach, observation, technique, impulse, intent, alternation, energy, and obsession. ...

"I consider the enterprise of poetry therefore to be musical and graphic at once, more than literary. For how much more illuminating and amusing it is (MUSIC/MOSAIC, belonging to the muses) to compose language, or to paint poetry, than to simply write it.

As should a book be as deep as a museum and as wide as the world."

(Stephen Rodefer, 'Preface' in Four Lectures, 1982)

In parliamentary terms: "hear! hear!"

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