SNOW SHOVEL

1) "Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words."--Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

2) New Incliner blog

3)"To the man who is lost in love, what will help him? An explanation?"--Wittgenstein

4) Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

5) How could I have known the effect the news would have, infusing my life with a need to do the opposite? A blanket of cotton. Girls on the Run. In account after account, the language was language, but the language was life and even better.

6) "We did what we had to, and we didn't survive. Only the fakes survive."--John Lydon, The Filth and the Fury

7) "Thanatos is the biggest tourist on Earth"--Roberto Bolano, 2666

8) "Stevens disliked explaining because he feared that readers would lose interest in poems they could comprehend fully. It was not a question of mystification. Rather, he understood that pure poetry succeeds when it detaches the rader from reason and reality lifts him by the most tenuous threads to another plane of existence. To explain is to make the reader overly onscious of those filaments and so to subvert their function."--Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

9) "Real mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be turned into better mysteries."--Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

10) "Here I am, well-advanced in my paper, with everything of interest that I started out to say remaining to be said."--Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

ALEXIS ORGERA: DESTROYER

Couldn't let today pass without posting this link to a new essay up at HTMLGiant by Alexis Orgera called "Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason":

Please enjoy. I certainly did. It's something I think about quite a lot--the notion that there is an ineffable something about the poems that floor us--something that can never be reduced to a list of gestures or a discussion of craft. And this is significantly why 1) poetry remains powerfully weird and 2) that teaching poetry writing is largely a matter of providing an atmosphere wherein students are excited to wander around in the dark BAM! As always, the things in a poem most worth talking about are the things that can't actually be talked out (not rationally, not methodically, not in terms of linear articulable instructions--and why on earth would anyone want to?), the unsayable said.