All evening, listening to his wonderful table talk, I found myself thinking: in six months you'll be dead, and I will have said that . . .

He prided himself on seeing through everyone. Then one evening, at a party, I saw how his focus always fell a little too far ahead of its object; and knew he had entered the realm of phantoms.

A fine recording by the seventy-year-old João Gilberto, still singing beautifully at an age when nearly every other singer has gone off . . . But there was nothing in his voice in the first place, no vibrato, no expression, nothing that could ever ripen and rot.

I enjoyed L's creeping senility. I could have him repeat my favorite stories as often as I wanted, sometimes several times in the space of the same afternoon. X's sudden lurch into his anecdotage, on the other hand, was a disaster: until then, his shyness had prevented our discovering what a bore he was.

I have the bad habit of deliberately making myself almost worthless in the eyes of those I most admire or love. This way they will sometimes reveal themselves to me utterly, as they would before a dog . . . Or so I'd like to think. I am unable to credit myself with anything, even bringing out the worst in people.

After-dinner metropolitan chitchat with the Blairites. Finally the company had agreed upon a black man so stupid they could all say so with impunity. Their relief was obscene.

The rose's night-black is as true as her day-red.

In the end, the desolate age always turns instinctively to Classicism, which if nothing else legislates against certain kinds of disappointment.

It is possible for a woman to say, honestly, that she has thought of her lover all day long — but she will neglect to mention the twenty other things she has kept in her head at the same time. A man ignorant of this ability will be terrified by her declaration, since were it to be his . . . it would be a straightforward admission of his own derangement.

The immortals, as invisible to us as the dead, know us as a fraternity of ghosts, the ones-who-move . . .

Long conversation with an American academic. I was freely brilliant (having first made certain, through a few delicate inquiries, that my reputation as an idiot had not preceded me): I took risks, I made brave and wild connections, I realized I did not care what he thought of me. I had fallen into a delicious dream of total immunity, discovering a whole continent that spoke the same language, but yet could do no damage to my name — or at least none I need give a shit about . . .

She was married, now — and happy, fat, a little jowly, loquacious, and given to fits of giggling. The metamorphosis had been so sudden, she gave the impression that the woman in whom I had found such a black mystery had either been just another pathetic fantasy of mine, or stuck at some . . . neotenic impasse.

Nothing more dangerous than the saviour who mistimes his appearance.

The bleakest and briefest of our human literatures, one I have seen men read and be straightaway moved to tears: the price tag.

The blush: what evolutionary advantage do we gain in the publication of our embarrassment? Perhaps we should give this safety valve of excess a little more credit. The secret shame, on the other hand, rarely has any effect on our future conduct.

Eventually most musicians give up listening to their instruments, as I did, and hear only themselves. The real musicians never stop. In poetry we call this the death of the lyric impulse.

You are physically closer to an acoustic guitar than any other instrument; its body beats and moans through your own, yes, like a lover's. Hence its attraction for losers and loners. The singer-songwriter, of whom Orpheus is the prototype, has his guitar primarily for company, not accompaniment. As he ascended from the dark, it belatedly dawned on Orpheus that he didn't really need his girlfriend, and he dumped her at the threshold.

I'm always amused by those commentators who nervously insist that the working class's constant use of the word fuck is really just "a form of punctuation." It is, however, no more or less than what they dread: an inexhaustible river of smelted wrath, a Phlegethon of ancestral grievance...

Music softens us up for everything; the takeoff, the poem, the needle, the bolt.

Beware the obsessive between obsessions: if his brain doesn't eat itself, it will eat yours.

The worst thing about thinking nothing of yourself is that you assume that your behavior has no consequence. This makes you much more dangerous than the egomaniac, who at least spends all his time calculating for the effects of himself.

Blessed is the wrongdoer who makes no attempt to explain his actions in terms other than pure evil.

What is it in the middle distance that implies our absence? Short focus signs our attention; long, our deep thought . . . But the eyes of the dead all converge on a point fifty yards away, presumably Death's own range.

My late friend hated book-jackets, and ripped them all off immediately. I think he felt, somehow, that the book was still trying to sell him its contents after he had paid for it (or turn him in, if he had stolen it). Dejacketed, the book is anonymous and valueless. To translate something immediately into this state is an unequivocal act of proprietorship. You remove a book-jacket just as you make a lover naked: before their complete possession, they must be removed from the currency.

There will always be one person who went to their grave knowing Shakespeare only as a moneylender, MacNiece as a poodle-fancier, Feynman as a bongo-player. The great and their little lives.

Obsessives are alike in at least one way: they are generally blind to the real marginality of their calling, and if it comes at all it comes as a great shock.

The Middle American is expert in the inflation and amplification of the first person, and dwells on it like no one else; as in "I'm gonna get my fat ol' lazy ass outta here."

Postmodernism will soon be confirmed as the American academic orthodoxy because it permits, ultimately, the summary dismissal of that last great inconvenience to the free and democratic intellect: the primary text.

I would never wish for my Christian friend to lose his faith. The thought of the eternal agony of 99% of his fellow humans was his one source of real pleasure.

Sometimes it's hard to be a guy. We can surf easily between Chomsky, Teen Anal, Theravada Buddhism, and the cheat-code for Grand Theft Auto with scarcely a hiccup of bad conscience; the Net has externalized (and so part-socialized, and so normalized) a mental routine that hitherto had kept itself hidden, as we naturally assumed such ugly, unmodulated key-changes would be read as a sign of our moral degeneracy. Only an idiot would say this is a good thing, however; society is partly woven together by the collective denial of our natures. The leap from savannah to settlement to city was much harder for us, as our mind- and skill-set were far less easily transferable. Had women not adapted so perfectly in a few million years, we would have cheerfully, and properly, taken another two billion over it.

Google, that new-minted, bright-eyed demon, that constant reminder that our little history now is no history at all, and that we must live with every insult we have delivered or received until we are ash and dust. Eventually it will guarantee the sensible government of our tongues in a way nothing else has yet been able to manage; but first things will get much worse.

Yes, I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far better; but let's face it — you weren't listening then either.

Of course memory is a function of, and only has meaning in, the present — and so is continually subject to revision in the light of what the present reveals. It transpires that he was not the faithful lover you had thought; that when she said those terrible things to you, she had just discovered she was dying . . . Nonetheless we should not concede that we got something badly wrong just because a new perspective alters its sense. All we gain is a practical demonstration — for once — that the meaning of our lives is unstable, as its information-content is unfixable. All we have is the interpretative act of memory, and its truths are only distinguished from its lies by the sheer luck of their being unchallenged. (It is further revealed, let's suppose, that his betrayal was fabricated by a jealous admirer; or that, from her old diaries, it's clear that you had disgusted her for years . . . and once again the memories must be sweetened or embittered to taste.) The only truth is the present, that present as yet still independent of memory — and so of all meaning.

Of the classes of metaphor, the prepositional is the most culturally insidious and hard to eradicate. There are under-interrogated consequences, for example, in thinking that we always write poems "on" or "about" a subject. In doing so we are often just extending our imaginative hegemony in another fatal act of misappropriation. We fall in love; so our lover feels entitled to assume that when our feelings undergo any complex change, we have simply fallen back out again. The Greeks thought their future behind them, and their past in front where they could see it; how much human misery has been caused by the dumb and hubristic inversion of that wholly sensible model?

Placing ourselves in complete chaos forces the creation of a center. For those who have lost theirs, a good tactic of last resort.

After my ten-minute machine-gun raga guitar solo, my father threw me, gently, out of his country-and-western band. We are frog-marched from the genres by their guardians; they know that anything beyond the smallest mutations will destroy them. Postmodernism is just a club for the turfed-out, for all those unwelcome Lamarckians, still bewildered at our failure to praise all the leaps they were making . . .

Only the mad are safe from doubt. I never fail to be mystified by those who regard the revision of a former opinion as a sign of weakness; it strikes me as a perfect guarantee of the commentator's sanity.

It's monstrous to think of our parents having sex, because we then have to think of them conceiving us . . . Hard enough to live with the exile without replaying the scene of the eviction.

Glamour is a sister of Hope. As soon as the guns fall silent and we're fed and warm again, little Glamour creeps out from under the stairs, with her filter-tips and kitten heels.

Good workmen blame their tools too; there's such a thing as bad tools. Really bad workmen tend to keep quiet about it, ask to be paid cash, and run.

Our "wonderful variety of regional accents" has been achieved by ensuring that half the population can't afford to travel more than ten miles from their birthplace. Nothing guarantees cultural diversity like cultural isolation. (The St. Kildans developed an incomprehensible form of Gaelic consisting mostly of speech impediments. Should we rejoice in this fact?) For the most part, diversity can only be enjoyed by those with the money to travel, which almost defines them as a class of cultural abstainers; as a cause, diversity can therefore only be championed by those who least embody it. Not that any of this is wrong; just that we should accept that most arguments to preserve it are wholly paternalistic.

God's joke, maybe, but he should work on his timing; I always had the feeling the Big Bang was a little precipitate. Nothing seemed ready.

Sincerity is no excuse. Writers sweat to write like lunatics, and painters sweat to paint like children. (By which I mean talentless children.) I know men who have spent thirty years learning how to sound like they're playing the piano with their backside. Now, if just one brave pair of buttocks had taken the stand beside them . . . As it was, they remained permanently oblivious to the shortcut, and thought their time well spent. I once sat through an hour of a man demonstrating his new technique for playing the saxophone: he sucked instead of blew. We punished him beautifully, however. We listened to him patiently; we gave him every encouragement . . .

The audience will always feel far more generous if, at some point in the evening, a little time has been found for them to applaud themselves.

The transcendental power of the dystopia. At the worst times in my life I have always sought to create them — socially, sexually, geographically — so that I might play out an escape, so that it might grow into a more generalized tactic . . .

All arts have their bass solo — the sestina, the lino-cut, the one-woman play, those tours de force that we admire not because they survive their perverse form with any style or aplomb, but without the total surrender of dignity; and that we applaud wildly, out of sheer relief . . .

POETRY
October 2005

Editor: Christian Wiman
Managing Editor: Helen Lothrop Klaviter
Assistant Editor: Fred Sasaki


© 2005 by The Poetry Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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