I read this great Paris Review interview with the poet Jack Gilbert earlier this afternoon and I can’t seem to get this quote out of my head:
The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in “I’m in love” or “my girl cheated on me”—I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We’re the only things—leaving religion out of it—we’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming.
We’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming. I love the imagery there. I love the idea of knowing there is life on the other side of winter. No matter where you are, what you’re going through, what you are feeling, etc, etc, there is life on the other side of it. Spring is coming.
“The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes to you from outside you, in books or in words, but that for it to live, something from within you must come to it and meet it and complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives a poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give to you, and give plenty.”
Everything is made.
History.
Promises.
Wishes.
Friends.
Computers.
Films.
Quilts.
Shakespeare.
Theories.
Tools.
Our habits.
Our homes.
Our relationships.
Our future.
The future
is something we make.
The world isn’t done yet.
We can make tomorrow
better.
There’s more work to do.
Thanks to this lecture from Project Projects and this old post from Rob Giampietro, I am now obsessed with pantoums. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines in the following stanza with two new lines introduced in each stanza making for this strange recursive, rhythmic cycle. By the end of this poem, A Date with Robbe-Grillet, I couldn’t stop smiling:
A Date with Robbe-Grillet
What I remember didn’t happen.
Birds stuttering.
Torches huddled together.
The café empty, with no place to sit.
Birds stuttering.
On our ride in the country
the café empty, with no place to sit.
Your hair was like a doll’s.
On our ride in the country
it was winter.
Your hair was like a doll’s
and when we met it was as children.
It was winter
when it rained
and when we met it was as children.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
When it rained
the sky turned the color of Pernod.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
Birds strutted.
The sky turned the color of Pernod.
Within the forest
birds strutted
and we came upon a second forest
within the forest
identical to the first.
And we came upon a second forest
where I was alone
identical to the first
only smaller and without music
where I was alone
where I alone could tell the story.
— Elaine Equi
A poem by Jorge Luis-Borges, whose birthday would have been today:
After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth…
And you learn and learn…
With every good-bye you learn.
There’s a small building with a black awning on 3rd Street in the Lower East Side. You’d think nothing of it if it wasn’t for the elaborate paintings that cover the front wall, making a stark divide from the brick facades surrounding it.
If you happened to wander inside this building on a Friday night, you’d find yourself in a small crowded brick room. The lights would be dimmed, the bar packed, and people of every age and background pushing their way towards a small platform that sits against the side wall. Large portraits hang askew across the brick wall. An energy pulsates through the room. They say there is no other place in the world where people line the streets outside on a Friday night to watch poetry. But at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, this is a normal Friday.
(via jackcheng)
An idea is not a design,
but it is an invitation to a journey.
A design is not a prototype,
but it is a plan for moving forward.
A prototype is not a program,
but it is a test for your assumptions.
A program is not a product,
but it is a milestone towards progress.
A product is not a business,
but it is the first fruit of an idea.
A business is not profits,
but it is a team behind your back.
Profits is not an exit,
but it is validation of your work.
And an exit is not happiness,
but happiness is not a destination.
Happiness is a journey.
Tony Chu, MFA candidate, turns around a Quora answer for first-time entrepreneurs that answers “what part of the process are people often completely blind to
Thanks to Tony for a reminder that what is can be turned around.
Lewis Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tale is a concrete poem, mixing visual form and text, from Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland. Bonus fact from Wikipedia:
The poem is a “quadruple pun”: besides being a tale about a tail, the poem is also typeset in the shape of a tail and its rhyme structure is that of a tail rhyme.
Anis Mojgani - For Those Who Can Still Ride an Airplane for the First Time…
I watch this about once a week.
“He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all of that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.”
I’ve long been a fan of spoken word poetry, and this TED Talk from Sarah Kay only furthers that fascination. More than just a short lecture, Kay’s performance explores creativity, storytelling, and how poetry is a way for her to figure out life. I loved this wonderful approach:
I use poetry to help me with what I don’t understand but I show up to each new poem with a backpack of everywhere else I’ve been.
That’s about as good a description of the creative life I’ve ever heard. Just watch the entire thing; if the first two minutes doesn’t completely suck you in, I’m not sure what will.
Jonah Lehrer explores the idea that true creativity is birthed within constraints and predetermined frames:
Unless poets are stumped by their art, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and banalities, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this helps explain the stubborn endurance of poetic forms: because poets need to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables, or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, they end up uncovering all sorts of unexpected associations. As Paul Valery declared: “A person is a poet if his imagination is stimulated by the difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them.”
I’ve always said that the best work, especially for designers, comes from figuring out how to work through the constraints (whether that be time, money, etc). Constraints provide a framework to start from and then an opportunity to find new solutions. I’m reminded of a quote from the children’s book illustrator Jerry Pinkney from when I heard him speak earlier this year:
I love watercolor because of the limitations. And it’s within those limitations that I find new possibilities.
“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
the sea seethes
the sweethearts seethe as the sea seethes
the sweethearts see stars
stars at sea
the war starts
Sweethearts by Emmett Williams is the seminal example of concrete poetry. Simply using letters from the word “sweethearts” evenly spaced across every page, Williams crafts a visual poem that acts as a flip book of sorts as the letters’ arrangements simulate the relationship between a man and woman.
In addition to being a groundbreaking literary work, to me, this is also a prime example of the union of language and visuals. First published in 1968, the book was recently put back in print.
