page 2
go back to the epigraphs index
The Art of Description by Mark Doty
“For the Eye altering alters all.”
-William Blake
“We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our inability to do so.”
-Lyn Hejinian
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
“Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.”
-Picasso
Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys by D.A. Powell
“The beauty of men never disappears
But drives a blue car through the
stars.”
-John Wieners
“And no one goes back to his God unscathed.”
-Nelly Sachs
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
-Ben Franklin
Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke by Rob Sheffield
“We make up what we can’t hear
Then we sing all night.”
-Sonic Youth
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
“Hamm: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
Nagg: I don’t know.
Hamm: What? What didn’t you know?
Nagg: That it’d be you.”
-Beckett, Endgame
One Day by David Nicholls
“What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.”
-Philip Larkin, “Days”
How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend by The Monks of New Skete
“Learning the value of silence is learning to listen to, instead of screaming at, reality: opening your mind enough to find what the end of someone else’s sentence sounds like, or listening to a dog until you discover what is needed instead of imposing yourself in the name of training.”
-Thomas Doblish, Monk of New Skete
(October 9, 1941-November 7, 1973).
in Gleanings, the Journal of New Skete
Winter 1973
“I love inseeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to insee, for example, a dog as one passes by. Insee (I don’t mean in-spect, which is only a kind of human gymnastic, by means of which one immediately comes out again on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the humanity lying behind it, not that,)—but to let oneself precisely into the dog’s very center, the point from which it becomes a dog, the places in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it under the influence of its first embarrassments and inspirations and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been better made… Laugh though you may, dear confidant, if I am to tell you where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was to be found, I must confess to you: it was to be found time and again, here and there, in such timeless moments of this divine inseeing.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems
Translated by J.B. Leishman
“But now ask the beasts and let them teach you,
And the birds of the air and let them tell you,
Or speak to the earth and let it inform you,
And let the fish of the sea recount to you.
Which among these does not know that the hand of God has done this,
In whose palm is the life of every living thing,
And the breath of every human being?”
-Job 12:7-10
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
“Optima dies… prima fugit”
-Virgil
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
“Oh, the torment bred in the race,
The grinding scream of death
And the stroke that hits the vein,
the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse no man can bear.
But there is a curse in the house,
and not outside it, no,
not from others but from them,
their bloody strife. We sing to you,
dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground –-
Answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.”
-Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers
“Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs to be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.”
-William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude
Life Without Law by Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness
“I want freedom, the right to self-expression,
everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
-Emma Goldman, 1931
Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides by Jessica Laser
“But, well, I don’t think artists have particularly bright ideas. Matisse’s ‘Woman in Blue, Woman in a Red Blouse,’ or something, you know—what an idea this is! Or the Cubists. When you think about it now, it is so silly to look at an object from many angles. It’s very silly. It’s good that they got those ideas because it is enough for some of them to become good artists.”
-Willem De Kooning
“’So it never went further than ‘Sergei Kuzmich?’ one lady asked.
‘No, no, not a hair’s breadth,’ Prince Vassily replied, laughing. ‘Sergei Kuzmich…from all sides. From all sides, Sergei Kuzmich.’ Poor Vyazmitinov just couldn’t get any further. He took up the letter several more times, but as soon as he said ‘Sergei’…sobs…’Ku…zmi…ch’—tears… and ‘from all sides’ was drowned in weeping, and he couldn’t go on. And again his handkerchief, and again ‘Sergei Kuzmich, from all sides,’ and tears…so that they finally asked someone else to read it.”
-Tolstoy
It Becomes You by Dobby Gibson
“I believed that I wanted to be a poet,
But deep down I wanted to be a poem.”
-Jaime Gil de Biedma
Application for Release from the Dream by Tony Hoagland
“The experiment failed;
the lead did not change into gold.
But the alchemist remembered
the lute hidden in his closet.”
-Thomas Owens
“It is hard to drop from the self into the soul.”
-James Hillman
Space Struck by Paige Lewis
“So while they journeyed up that sloping road,
the Sibyl told her story to Aeneas;
they exited the underworld to Cumae,
and there Aeneas offered customary
sacrifices, then landed on the shore
that, as yet, did not bear his nurse’s name.”
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIV
“I hear eternity
Is self-forgetting.”
-Lynn Xu, “Earth Light: I”
how much of what falls will be left when it gets to the ground? By Carolyn Guinzio
“O my floating life
Do not save love
for things
Throw things
to the flood”
-Lorine Niedecker
that ex by Rachelle Toarmino
“Oh, so it’s my fault?”
-Carmela Soprano
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
“… life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic.”
-Virginia Woolf
Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide by Mark Yakich
“Beware of advice, even this.”
-Carl Sandburg
The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach
“The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.”
-George Oppen
The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young
“A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disoreder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
-Wallace Stevens “Connoisseur of Chaos”
“ You’ll never catch a fish
that way, you said. One caught a fish that way.”
-Robert Hass, “Berkeley Eclogue”
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
“The landscape crossed out with a pen
reappears here”
-Bei Dao
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
“To live he hurries and to feel makes haste.”
-Prince Vjazemsky
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
-William Faulkner, Light in August
“And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering.”
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
“Clock time is our bank manager,
tax collector, police inspector;
this inner time is our wife.”
-J.B. Priestley
Man and Time
LOVE AFTER LOVE
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
-Derek Walcott
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
“And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain.”
-Pascal, Pensées
The Space Poet by Samantha Edmonds
“The space station staff liked her when they interviewed her [but had] one question: Will you be lonely in space?
… Yes, she said, but I have always been lonely.”
-Amber Sparks, “The Janitor in Space,” The Unfinished World
“I cannot live on this planet without thinking I’m not going to get another chance to leave it.”
-Mike Massimino, astronaut
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”
-Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Lonliness
The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write (Part One) by Adam Lauver
“There are two ways to deal with things.
Write about them,
or curl up and die in them.”
-Dream ghost, personal communication
Loudermilk, or, The Real Poet, or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives
“Rilke was a jerk.”
-John Berryman
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
“An ancient buddha once said:
For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop,
For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor,
For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms,
For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha,
For the time being, a monk’s staff or a master’s fly-swatter,
For the time being, a pillar or a lantern,
For the time being, any Dick or Jane,
For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.”
-Dōgen Zenji, “For the Time Being”
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
“As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean:
‘Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it,
Rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.’
‘What’s that?’ Anna asked.
‘Water,’ the Dutchman said. ‘Well, and time.’”
-Peter Van Houten, An Imperial Affliction
The Tijuana Book of the Dead by Luis Alberto Urrea
“I am trying to say beloved.
I am trying to keep my baskets from spilling.
I am trying to keep my necklaces on.
I am saying I know this story.
I am saying I know these people.
I am calling beloved the curves of my mother’s arch.
I am calling blessed the arcs of blood.
I am saying this story is not about to end.”
-Darrell Bourque, Burnt Water Suite
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
“No hay mal que dure cien años,
ni cuerpo que lo resista.”
-Spanish proverb
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen
“The sadness will last forever.”
-Vincent Van Gogh
Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
“If you could go back, who would you want to meet?”
Beloved by Toni Morrison
“I will call them my people,
which were not my people;
and her beloved,
which was not beloved.”
-Romans 9:25
The Art of Leaving by Ayelet Tsabari
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
-James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Exit, Pursued by Dalton Day
“You’re the curses through my teeth
You’re the laughter, you’re the obscene”
-St. Vincent, “Actor Out of Work”
An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World by Jon Cone and Rauan Klassnik
“ …we have seen fit
To synchronize this play with
Sqeualings of pigs, slow sound of guns,
The sharp dead click
Of empty chocolatebar machines.
We say again: there are
No exits here, no guards to bribe,
No washroom windows.”
-Weldon Kees
A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims
“I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention. Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route. I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny. Other situations share this feature of the unintentional return. One comes back again and again to the same spot. To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by death, dead bodies, revenants… The return of the dead.”
-Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
“Human love is implicated with death, because it implies either resurrecting the beloved or following the spouse into the death realm. It is fitting that the lost one is a synonym for the dead one, since the dead are lost de jure and one loses them de facto in the labyrinth. Marriage requires the spouse to follow his wife into the labyrinthine realm of death… To follow them into undeath, as Orpheus did. Orpheus is the model spouse.”
-Jalal Toufic, Undying Love, or Love Dies
Thud! by Terry Pratchett
“The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws.
The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World.
The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave.
The fifth thing Tak did, he wrote a geode, an egg of stone.
And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched, and the Brothers were born.
The first Brother walked toward the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws and he was enlightened.
The second Brother walked toward the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.
But some of the living spirit of Tak was trapped in broken stone egg, and it became the first Troll, wandering the world unbidden and unwanted, without soul or purpose, learning or understanding. fearful of light and darkness it shambles forever in twilight, knowing nothing, learning nothing, creating nothing, being nothing...”
-From ‘Gd Tak ‘Gar’ (The Things Tak Wrote), trans. Prof. W. W. W. Wildblood. Ankh-Morpork: Unseen University. AM$8. In the original, the last paragraph of the quoted text appears to have been added by a much later hand.
“Him who mountain crush him no
Him who sun him stop him no
Him who hammer him break him no
Him who fire him fear him no
Him who raise him head above him heart
Him diamond”
-Translation of Troll pictograms found carved on a basalt slab in the deepest level of the Ankh-Morpork treakle mines, in pig-treacle measures estimated at 500,000 years
A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle
“’What, nephew,” said the king,
is the wind in that door?”
-Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur
Hard Child by Natalie Shapero
“Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.”
-Cees Nooteboom, Rituals
Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
THERE ARE FOUR OF US
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friends, two voices, talking in their turn,
Did I say two?... There by the eastern wall,
where criss-cross shoots of brambles trail,
-O look!- that fresh dark elderberry branch
is like a letter from Marina in the mail.
-Anna Akhmatova
November 1961 (in delirium)
While Standing in Line for Death by CAConrad
“A poem is a ‘line’ between any two points in creation.”
-Charles Olson
Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness by CAConrad
“This is a classic slingshot”
-My Grandmother
The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault
“… terribler
Like a Panther in the Glove”
-Emily Dickinson
My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
“ It is the women above all – there never have been women, save pioneer Katies; not one in flower save some moonflower Poe may have seen, or an unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never. Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father’s garden, is the very nearest we have ever been – starving.
Never a woman: never a poet. That’s an axiom. Never a poet saw sun here.”
-William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain.
Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh
“Everybody gotta eat, right?”
-Common
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
“I am singing a song that can only be born
after losing a country.”
-Joy Harjo
Shock by Shock by Dean Young
“as a golden mouth lightly touches
a forehead fashioned of cobwebs,
I seemed to have entered an unsuspected portal.”
-Kenneth Patchen
Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder
“Stop this day and night with me and you
shall possess the origin of all poems…”
-Walt Whitman
“Extreme clarity is a mystery.”
-Mahmoud Darwish
“The poet is always our contemporary.”
-Virginia Woolf
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
“Cosi n’andammo infino alla lumiera,
parlando cose, che il tacere è bello,
sì com’ era il parlar colà dov’ era.”
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier
“The strong in spirit wear bright clothes of fire.
They dance and burn. The light is worth the pain.
The light is worth the pain.
The pain stops when the flame dies out.”
-Hugh Blumenfeld
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
“Live by the foma that make you brave
and kind and healthy and happy.”
-The Books of Bokonon. I: 5
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
“When he hath tried me,
I shall come forth as gold.”
-Job
play dead by francine j. harris
“Nothing you wouldn’t know about.”
-Gayl Jones
from Eva’s Man
Song from a Mountain by Amanda Nadelberg
“I’m expressing my inner anguish through the majesty of song.”
-Ron Burgundy
Don’t Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt
“She isn’t making noise for the sake of making noise. She’s letting me inside her head, and for the first time in my life, I feel I can almost imagine it—what it’d be like to exist as a completely different person, to have their thoughts and feelings instead of my own.”
-Kheryn Callender, Hurricane Child
“Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that?”
-Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
“She needed a way to be sure it was her inside the machine.”
-April Daniels, Dreadnought
go back to the epigraphs index
/e/