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wordsmithery...Heather McHugh
Mar. 6th, 2007 06:40 pmIn the studio and in my thoughts...as the wind rushes about outside...and in between I'm reading some glorious writing...relating and resonating to so much..
snippetsampling:
"Our being alive at all is a monumental oddity. Such a small band of the spectrum is visible or audible to us- that's a sort of covenant with the beyonds (lower-case b). For most wavelengths, we don't even have detectors. I grant the lack; I luxuriate in it. The lack's a luck: I like to study what our narrow bands strike up, from the fabric of the unforeknown. It doesn't have to be big. As scopes go, the eletron micro's just as exciting as the Hubble tele. Whatever you cast your eyes on (or your vows, or your vowels) keeps deepening into further fractals of unsynopsizability. (We can't know the mystery, said Yeats, but we are in it.) For efficiency's sake, if we're half-sane, we edit our experience even before we have it (not only after): we become experts at abridging the endlessness, so we won't drown; we live the Cliff's Notes version of our lives. Content's a good stay against the uncontainable. But it's not as reliable as its narrators think. And it's certainly not all there is. Wittgenstein says our lives are endless in precisely the way our visual fields are endless."
"I've always wanted to do one of those monastic retreats where nobody talks at all for a month. If I could afford to stop teaching, I'd gladly shut up. Writing is my way of being quiet- being quiet and looking around, here on earth, where things in fact (as not in our cheapened intentions) are extraordinarily strange. I take to heart the little caveat in Chekhov's journal: "She had too little skin to cover her face. In order to open her eyes she had to shut her mouth, and vice versa. "
I write to keep my eyes open."
from an interview with poet Heather McHugh by Matthea Harvey in BOMB magazine.
snippetsampling:
"Our being alive at all is a monumental oddity. Such a small band of the spectrum is visible or audible to us- that's a sort of covenant with the beyonds (lower-case b). For most wavelengths, we don't even have detectors. I grant the lack; I luxuriate in it. The lack's a luck: I like to study what our narrow bands strike up, from the fabric of the unforeknown. It doesn't have to be big. As scopes go, the eletron micro's just as exciting as the Hubble tele. Whatever you cast your eyes on (or your vows, or your vowels) keeps deepening into further fractals of unsynopsizability. (We can't know the mystery, said Yeats, but we are in it.) For efficiency's sake, if we're half-sane, we edit our experience even before we have it (not only after): we become experts at abridging the endlessness, so we won't drown; we live the Cliff's Notes version of our lives. Content's a good stay against the uncontainable. But it's not as reliable as its narrators think. And it's certainly not all there is. Wittgenstein says our lives are endless in precisely the way our visual fields are endless."
"I've always wanted to do one of those monastic retreats where nobody talks at all for a month. If I could afford to stop teaching, I'd gladly shut up. Writing is my way of being quiet- being quiet and looking around, here on earth, where things in fact (as not in our cheapened intentions) are extraordinarily strange. I take to heart the little caveat in Chekhov's journal: "She had too little skin to cover her face. In order to open her eyes she had to shut her mouth, and vice versa. "
I write to keep my eyes open."
from an interview with poet Heather McHugh by Matthea Harvey in BOMB magazine.
