Pejman Yousefzadeh

theparisreview:

“But all this world is like a tale we hear -
Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.”

― فردوسی, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, completed by Ferdowsi on this day in the year 1010.

Well worth reading.

davidajohnsonart:

And it is enough for the poet to be the guilty conscience of his time.
Saint-John Perse

davidajohnsonart:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.
Aeschylus

theferocity:

“It is difficult / to the get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday / for lack / of what is found there.”

davidajohnsonart:

Poets are people who can still see the world through the eyes of children.
Alphonse Daudet

laphamsquarterly:

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and
show,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor
Mississippi’s stream:
—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still
small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—
Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the
peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart
pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

Walt Whitman, “Election Day, 1884”

theparisreview:

“Robert Frost once made a witty definition of poetry. He said: ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation.’ Since every word in a poem is precious, every syllable counts, and every pause gives a certain effect, it’s difficult to translate poems, because different languages make different sounds, and words with the same meaning may differ in their associative auras. In fact, so often a great poem is just sheer good luck because the language permits certain effects to be made by someone with long discipline in the use of language, who has a flash in which the words and ideas just fall in a particular way. If you have the instrument in good order, and you’ve worked at it for a long time, and are disciplined by long practice, even by a lot of five-finger exercises, work that was thrown away—you may be blessed by having things happen that are a little beyond you. ‘Chance aids the ingenious artist,’ as Proust has said.

—John Hall Wheelock, The Art of Poetry No. 21

theparisreview:

“My poetry has been called polyphonic, which is to say that I have always been full of voices speaking; in a way I consider myself an instrument, a medium. My friend Jeanne Hersch, who introduced me to the existentialism of Karl Jaspers, used to say, “I have never seen a person so instrumental,” meaning that I was visited by voices. There is nothing extraterrestrial in this, but something within myself. Am I alone in this? I don’t think so. Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges. I have written about the difficulty of remaining the same person when such guests enter and go and take us for their instrument. But we must hope to be inspired by good spirits, not evil ones.”

—Czeslaw Milosz, The Art of Poetry No. 70