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Friday Notebook 07.08.2011
“You have to make an about-face and leave the poem, [Char] said to me, and this you must do at the moment of deepest emotion, when you belong to it most entirely and you are at your weakest. Yet the turning-away is unavoidable, and you must find the strength to accomplish it.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.01.2011
For my birthday, 80 degrees.Light wind. Windy light. * “Develop your legitimate strangeness.” —René Char, “Formal Share,” XXII (trans. Mary Ann Caws) * “To be a poet is to have an appetite for discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of all things existing and foreseen, stirs up, at the moment of closure, happiness.” —Char, “Formal Share,” XLII * “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us, that keeps awake courage and silence.” —Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans.Read More
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Char Contra Conceptual Writing*
René Char “The poet is that part of man rebellious to calculated projects.” —René Char, from his preface to Furor and Mystery (1948). _____________________________*Viz., con artists like Kenneth Goldsmith: “I will refer to the kind of writing in which I am involved as conceptual writing. In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.Read More