If the artist carries through his [or her] idea and makes it into visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance. The idea itself, even if not made visual is as much a work of art as any finished product. All intervening steps—scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work, models, studies, thoughts, conversations—are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.
My goal is to experience the depths of life, to understand people and how they live, and to express this through my art. All my other accomplishments mean nothing to me. If I can only create a masterpiece that achieves the goal I’ve fixed my inward gaze upon during my creative journey, my life will not have been wasted.
—Qiu Miaojin, Last Words From Montmartre (translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich)
Sometimes it’s not even complicated? Sometimes it just comes down to a person knowing you in their innermost heart and trusting you with their innermost heart and that’s about it? Sometimes it’s cruelly, specifically simple.
“Q: What would you like to tell young people? A: I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”
“Everything I’ve ever known is like a dream. Like something carefully put together by someone living in my head.”
— Chelsea Wolfe, from Unknown Rooms; A Collection; “Flatlands,” c. 2012
“When you look at a body you see a history.”
— Louise Glück, from The Complete Poems: 1962-2012; “Walking at Night,”
“If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet’s natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet’s basic qualification, the need for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification for a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can’t be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.”
— Craig Morgan Teicher, Ars Poetica: Origin Stories
“That the branches of poetry are silence and wound.”
— Paisley Rekdal, from “Nightingale: A Gloss”
“[The struggle of writing] is to intercept silence. Poetry is silence, a silence comparable to an underlying light around me, in me, on the paper. I know that if I lean over my desk, this silence will be summoned to spill forth drop by drop and that, subtly, the sharpened point of the pen will break free of my heart and spread across the expanse the brief trembling of a drawing. Poetry is a drawing that expresses the silence…”
— Silvia Baron Supervielle (trans. Jason Weiss) in The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris
“My poems express more of my silence than of my talking. As music is a kind of silence. Sounds are needed for different layers of silence to be highlighted.“
— Anna Kamieńska, from 1970
“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”
— Charles Simic, The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry
“Silence is inside the word as something to be read.”
— Edmond Jabès, From the Book to the Book
“Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his [or her] pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.”
— Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974)
“Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. it is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women who run with Wolves
