it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it in

Because it's all poetry.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

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May 23rd, 2012
In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feeet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor’s airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.
The last paragraph of Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being.
May 17th, 2012
I sit down at my desk and can’t remember how it’s done. Only now and then the lines attack like birds of prey, any time, any place. And demand to be written.
Anna Kamienska, from ‘A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook’

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

May 4th, 2012
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don’t know whether I can cry or not. I don’t know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William Faulkner, from ‘As I Lay Dying’
March 15th, 2012
Joyce consulted Jung, who diagnosed his poor daughter as incurably schizophrenic partly on the evidence of her brilliant, obsessive punning. Joyce remarked that he too was a punner. “You are a deep-sea diver,” said Jung. “She is drowning.
Edward Hoagland, ‘Learning to Eat Soup’

What comes to me now is how I approached on the road a cage of rabbits. I was standing, contemplating them, their eagerness at the bars, when a man emerged from the house opposite, hay in hand. ‘Are the rabbits for eating?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re beautiful, no?’

‘And how are you?’ said Winnie-the-Pooh.
Eeyore shook his head from side to side.
‘Not very how,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long time.’
A.A. Milne, ‘In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail’
February 13th, 2012
Saturday night, the sky opens up with feathers. We are in the city street. Angels spin and fly above us on ziplines. It’s a summer evening, but these feathers come down like snow. Strangers take to playing in the street, chase each other and dump armloads of feathers on each other’s heads. Everywhere I look people are laughing, unweary, unwary. Sunday, we ride around the island. Everything salty and bleached. We stop at one beach after another, sometimes swimming, sometimes looking out at abandoned osprey nests, the remnants of a shipwreck, the small dugite slithering into the underbrush, innumerable birds. I get sunburnt. Let no-one say otherwise - the Australian sun is brutal. Even now, I find feathers in my hair, in my bag. One sticks to my eyelash as I sleep. I know I left some on the island. Tight forearms from Saturday climbing, weary legs from the Sunday cycling. The best way to carry the weekend with you is on the body.

  1. Saturday night, the sky opens up with feathers. We are in the city street. Angels spin and fly above us on ziplines. It’s a summer evening, but these feathers come down like snow. Strangers take to playing in the street, chase each other and dump armloads of feathers on each other’s heads. Everywhere I look people are laughing, unweary, unwary.
  2. Sunday, we ride around the island. Everything salty and bleached. We stop at one beach after another, sometimes swimming, sometimes looking out at abandoned osprey nests, the remnants of a shipwreck, the small dugite slithering into the underbrush, innumerable birds.
  3. I get sunburnt. Let no-one say otherwise - the Australian sun is brutal.
  4. Even now, I find feathers in my hair, in my bag. One sticks to my eyelash as I sleep. I know I left some on the island.
  5. Tight forearms from Saturday climbing, weary legs from the Sunday cycling.
  6. The best way to carry the weekend with you is on the body.

February 1st, 2012
I was born of writing, Before that, there was only a play of mirrors. With my first novel, I knew that a child had got into the hall of mirrors. By writing I was existing … I existed only in order to write and if I said ‘I’, that meant ‘I who write’.
Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention 
January 24th, 2012
Dear friend,
I have not written to you for a long time, and meanwhile have been in France and have seen the cold and lonely earth …

Hölderlin, in a letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, translated by Michael Hamburger, in Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments

Me too, Friedrich, me too.

January 16th, 2012
Our mistakes are our leaps in the night. Error is not a lie: it is approximation. Signs that we are on track.
Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata.
(The author or) The artist is the gardener of the thorn bush in spite of himself. He has been placed and then raised in a thorn bush, and even as, like Kafka’s character, he asks the Guardian of the Park to quickly bring help, he is already thinking about what he will write with one of these sharpened gorses, if he survives the awful accident. Sometimes he does not survive.
Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata.
November 13th, 2011
They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon the mastery of one’s language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Joan Didion, from the essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1967), in which she reported on the young people moving en masse to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco,  to drop out and ‘turn on’. It seems to me Didion, in her own haughty manner, is saying (almost) the same thing as Carver was saying here (“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones”). I often find myself in arguments about the precision of language, flinching at the misuse of ‘adorn’, or marvelling over the origins of ‘oubliette’. Absolutely, there can be energy and a certain wryness to misusing words, or to being deliberately vague (I like using ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ and even ‘shit’ to gloss over things/stuff/shit), but that’s different from the fogginess or laziness that Didion notices here.

Much of what Didion experienced in the District can be found in the gobsmacking (I mean that precisely) near-ending, where Didion is introduced to a five-year-old girl:

The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

November 6th, 2011
A single seraphic word. You can examine the word with a click, tracing its origins, development, earliest known use, its passage between languages, and you can summon the word in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic, in a thousand languages and dialects living and dead, and locate literary citations, and follow the word through the tunneled underworld of its ancestral roots.
Fasten, fit closely, bind together.
And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in a drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive - a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.
Peace.
Don DeLillo, Underworld. Last lines.
October 23rd, 2011
And as far as comprehension goes, I find poetry actually has very little mystery compared to anything else. Just this morning at the bus stop, a little electronic sign told me my bus was arriving in two minutes, then one minute, then “arriving,” although the street remained empty. Then it was gone. I’d missed a bus that had never arrived. Not a phrase in The Tennis Court Oath can touch that for sheer befuddlement.

Daniel Handler, ‘Happy, Snappy, Sappy’

This whole (brief) essay is delightful: the man you might know as Lemony Snicket in search of the perfect time and place to read poetry.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

October 20th, 2011
And every time I set eyes on Lake Bala, particularly when its surface was churned up by the wind in winter, I remembered the story Evan the cobbler had told me, about the two headstreams of Dwy Fawr and Dwy Fach which are said to flow right through the lake, far down in its dark depths, never mingling their waters with its own. The two rivers, according to Evans, said Austerlitz, were called after the only human beings not drowned but saved from the biblical deluge in the distant past.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz