Quoteables: "The Way We Learn to Look"

There's a wonderful conversation about poetry and political realities in the latest issue of Gulf Coast. The conversation begins with several poets discussing the Deep Water Horizon explosion and the soft language that was used to describe that accident:

Fred Marchant: The "innocence" of the word "spill" is a political construct or artifact. I don't yet have the exact word for what this event is, but it is more than a spill, is closer to a bleed and a wound, and is certainly representative of a deep violation of our compact with each other and our compact with life on the planet.

And then a little later, this from Patricia Smith:

Strange that I became a poet, since I was raised not to trust language or, for that matter, anything I was seeing. I was raised by a woman who was convinced that the moon landing was staged in an Arizona desert. Growing up on the west side of Chicago--the part of town everyone told you to stay away from--language was used not so much to communicate, but to keep us in our place. The "national insurance" my parents paid every week was nothing but a white, outstretched hand. Our "modern urban development" was a slum, plain and simple. I learned early that soft language almost always hid hard edges.

So I don't look at the pretty pictures, or even the murky shots of the underwater spew. I look beneath everything I hear. That's where I find the verbs and nouns that nobody wants to use.

--from "The Way We Learn to Look: A conversation with Nick Flynn, Brenda Hillman, Dorianne Laux, Fred Marchant, Laura Mullen, and Patricia Smith," Gulf Coast, Winter/Spring 2011.

Lady Zora

Each time I read this opening to Their Eyes Were Watching God, I'm thankful:

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment."

~Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

A Monday Quote

"How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market? Modern artists have resolved this dilemma in several different ways, each of which, it seems to me, has two essential features. First, the artist allows himself to step outside the gift economy that is the primary commerce of his art and make some peace with the market. Like the Jew of the the Old Testament who has a law of the altar at home and a law of the gate for dealing with strangers, the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market. And then--the necessary second phase--if he is successful in the marketplace, he converts market wealth into gift wealth: he contributes his earnings to the support of his art."
--Lewis Hyde from The Gift

Quote of the Day

“To live for art, is to live a life of questioning. And if you believe, as I do, that to live for art demands that every other part of life be moved towards one end, then the question, 'How shall I live?' is fierce."

––Jeanette Winterson/Art Objects