On Poetry

Once a poem's left home it doesn't care about you.

- - -

"Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You beleif a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. Am I right?"

"Sort of"

"Your 'sort of' is annoying. A yes or a not, or a qualification, please. 'Sort of' is an idle loubard, and ignorant vandale. 'Sort of' says 'I am ashamed by clarify and precision.' So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?"

"Yes."

"Yes. Idiots labor in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue."

- - -

...the poem is a raid on the inarticulate...Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, cliches of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes, makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is.


-David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, pg. 146-147.

The humanities remain essential to any genuine education not because they directly address the question of the being of the world (this is the work of science), but because they are faithful to the question of what is other that "what is."  Religion, art, fiction, music, film, theater, poetry, etc., are all essential because they protest the vanity of the world and aim to induce the birth of the new.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 110

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe.  To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 4

While most emotions lead to some kind of action, aesthetic experience is purely contemplative and is completely satisfying in itself.

Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 85)

Sometimes a student dedicated to the study of textbooks forgets that feeling plays an even larger role in his life than does reason.  Both the motivation to act and the satisfactions gained from action are felt.  Reason is a good guide and a needed one, but feeling is the dynamics of living.  We love and hate, fear and hope, desire happiness and hunger and thirst after truth and goodness. The feeling aspect of life cannot be gainsaid; it must be fulfilled.  and the arts beckon us to a rich source of deep emotional satisfaction.

Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 84-85)

The artist experiences and interprets reality largely through the medium of feeling.  This explains why there is so much individuality in art and so little unanimity in contrast with science, which is based more on thought.  The sensitive, imaginative, creative insight of the artist, while related to thought and based on experience, seems to transcend them both in its apprehension and representation of reality.  Great artists have learned to express feeling and to trust it as a meaningful approach to truth.

-Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (pg. 35)

"It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be not other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 326)

"An artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You [cut off your payos] because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea as an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald...Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art...You want to cutt off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 257)

"I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world...One day you will understand about the truth of feelings."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 226)

"As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it...An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 218)

"You draw with too much love. No man can love as much as you and survive as an artist. You will become sentimental. And sentimentalism is death to art."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 215)

"No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right no attempt to add to it or to rebel against it."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 213)

"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 212)