"the gap between image and real light"
Benjamin, Mandelstam, Mead, Dugan, García Lorca, Gilbert, Glück
Walter Benjamin:
Osip Mandelstam:
Memory loves to go hunting in the dark.
Jane Mead:
Alan Dugan:
Federico García Lorca:
My whole childhood was centered on the village. Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity. I’m often surprised when people think that the things in my work are daring improvisations of my own, a poet’s audacities. Not at all. They’re authentic details, and seem strange to a lot of people because it’s not often that we approach life in such a simple, straightforward fashion: looking and listening.... I have a huge storehouse of childhood recollections in which I can hear the people speaking. This is poetic memory, and I trust it implicitly.
Christopher Gilbert:
Louise Glück:
I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear—not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it. For me, the aural experience of a poem is transmitted visually. I hear with my eyes and dislike reading aloud and (except on very rare occasions) being read to. The poem becomes, when read aloud, a much simpler, sequential shape: the web becomes a one-way street. In any case, the knowledge, or hope, that the reader exists is a great solace.
About Sean Singer
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