Category Archives: quotes

music, quotes, Uncategorized

i don’t like repetition. i don’t like it at all.

…when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, “you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.”

-composer Elliott Carter, still avant-garde at 100 years old, interviewed by the Boston Herald. Via ArtsJournal. There’s also a great anecdote about my favorite composer, Charles Ives:

I [Carter] remember vividly this Sunday afternoon. I was taken to his [Ives’s] house by some friends, and we sat down and talked about music. I told him I liked Stravinsky. He sat at the piano, and I don’t think he had ever seen the score, he started playing the “Firebird.” And he said you can not repeat the way Stravinsky does. He was very angry about it, he said that’s just wrong. He thought repetition was a danger.

He didn’t really teach me anything, because I didn’t know much about music and I was just writing lousy little pieces. But I knew I had to study and I did at Harvard and such. But I admired his music. He had given up composing before I knew him. There were all these copies of his scores in the American Music Center which I went through and they were messy, and I tried to do something that I couldn’t follow up, tried to clean them up, they were awful. Like I think it was the fourth symphony, for two measures there would be six trombones playing and that’s all. I though maybe it’s all right, but it bothered me. I wanted to clean them up while he was alive, but it was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Finally Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell took over.

And Ives was against my going to Paris and studying with Boulanger. He thought I should stay home and be American. I one time went to visit him in Redding, and he played the “Concord Sonata” for me. He had a big vein in his neck and he held it like that, and his wife said, “Charlie you better quit now.” And she gave him a glass of milk. He was not well for years when he stopped composing.

I was involved with a music festival at Columbia, and I proposed that they do “The Unanswered Question” and “Central Park After Dark,” and I wrote to Mrs. Ives asking if they had been performed before. She said yes, some men in a New Haven vaudeville show had done it, and it would be unfair to call it a first performance.

I got this in a letter I got from her, and she said he was too sick to write back. But then I found out that he had written it, and she had copied it and added stuff. I have a whole article about things that she changed.

That last bit there relates quite pointedly to the previous post about who gets to relate whose experience. Yep.

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poetry, quotes, writing

the literal sense

A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.

– Stephen Edgar, in the April 2008 issue of POETRY Magazine, on translating Anna Akhmatova

I was rereading my old POETRYs and refound this quote, which I love. The hanger business is apropos – I just cut out the unused pages from a journal I stopped writing in 2001 to avoid writing about something sad. I am binding them, by hand, to one severed limb of a plastic coat hanger, to make a new journal. I haven’t done this since I made a blank book from a make-a-book kit as a kid, and that book was so pretty I didn’t want to write in it. This one is nice and ugly and serviceable.

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books, Great October Reread, poetry, quotes

enough money to keep a chicken alive

Early in my life I determined not to teach because I like teaching very much. I thought if I was going to be a real poet – that is, write the best poetry I possibly could – I would have to guard my time and energy for its production, and thus I should not, as a daily occupation, do anything else that was interesting. Of necessity I worked for many years at many occupations. None of them, in keeping with my promise, was interesting.

Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world’s work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.

This I have always known – that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come some day to bitter and mortal regret.

– Mary Oliver, “Conclusion,” A POETRY HANDBOOK (Great October Reread of 2008, 1/90)

Having unpacked the ninety books I own, I have been rereading them, one at a time. I think I will make this a yearly tradition if I can, to at least open if not completely reread every book I own, and to quote from it on this blog. If I cannot find anything worth quoting or commenting on, or don’t care about the book enough, I will get rid of it. To this end, this post begins a new category, the Great October Reread. For my own facetiousness I will also note that I am not blogging about these books in the exact order of rereadership. I devoured ON BEAUTY first, and dipped into the Norton, and was browsing through CODEPENDENT NO MORE before I got to this one.

My mother gave me A POETRY HANDBOOK when I was in high school, and those words – particularly the “bitter and mortal regret” – have rung in my ears since then. I did not realize until now, on this reread, how seriously I have taken Oliver’s admonition to avoid interesting work – and how strangely guilty I feel for the interesting occupations I have pursued, such as directing, for diverting my energy from my truer, older calling. However, since she ultimately did become a teacher, I think I may safely say that I aspire to do the same, and sooner than her, without damage to the poetry.

I also think that it is safe, even necessary, to have interesting occupations as a writer, as long as they do not become preoccupations which prepossess the poetics. That will always be a danger, but for someone as desperately determined to write as Oliver was and is, it cannot be greatly feared. (I have been watching too much PRIDE AND PREJUDICE – I sound like plaigarized Austen. “Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is real superiority of mind…”)

We are all in danger from many things, Dara, Darcy, and every prideful person and poet on the planet. But let’s (and by us I mean me) not be in danger of letting the fear of that danger drive us to doing nothing.

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criticism, poetry, quotes

the poet might have been eaten by a shark

In his description of [Hart] Crane’s death, [biographer Paul] Mariani was attracted to the captain’s notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark—”Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?” This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer’s fantasies—and gruesome fantasies they are—don’t mitigate the critic’s error of fact.
[…]
I once heard an undergraduate, a stack or two over in a faceless library, say plaintively, “What are you going to do about the Jesus in my heart?” What are you going to do about the poetry in my heart? If the critic were meant to offer solace, he would have taken up a different line of work.

– William Logan, “The Hart Crane Controversy,” on Poetry Magazine’s website.

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