Saturday, September 18

Poetry has to do with a satisfaction with limited things, a paring down. It is the acceptance of a certain form of poverty. It is not endless construction.

Mo Fei

Monday, September 13

In summer, too, Canute-like: sitting there, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.

Herman Melville, "The Piazza"

Thursday, September 2

recall

What’s recalled returns by chance. Stirred not by any wish to remember but by the taste of mint in the back of your throat or by a slanted light through amber curtains or by in passing the briefest scent of soap or lotion or the shape a trail of smoke who rises from a cigarette describes or by the sound a single engine airplane makes or what’s recalled is vivid again by the shift in tone of voice or by the quaver or stirred again by the way a garment hangs or by some unnoticed trip like so many occasions trivial and gone but for a note awaken some bloom who puts together pieces of an older record. There is a name for the history of the lives of saints but there is no name for the sudden chaff we suppose and bear.

...

It turns out we’re graded not by what we contain but instead by our elisions.

Russell Persson, "These Threads Who Lead to Bramble"