"No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time knowledge." -- Artaud

"My ambition is to corner the reader and make him or her imagine and think differently." -- Charles Simic

Good words from Vulgata:

Poetry is a means of exploring the intimate relationships between form and content. A poem that is in the form of raw inspiration dropped out onto a page with line breaks is a very good beginning, but it [is] like an uncut diamond: it is not yet a poem. The process of crafting this raw material into a work is difficult. The inspiration must be carefully cropped and pruned, without killing it. Bad poetry errs in three ways: it is uninspired, it is inspired but not crafted, or it is inspired, and then wrought to death. The great thing to avoid is writing a "poem" that is really just normal prose that has been centered in the middle column of a page; but which has no meter, metaphor, enriched adjectives, etc.

Final thoughts (found in choriamb)

It doesn't matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! ... are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.

I've decided to build my cult up around Wallace Stevens quotes. I never knew he thought up such witty, sagacious, interesting things, much less wrote them down.

"Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. A man has no choice about his style. When he says I am my style the truth reminds him that it is his style that is himself. If he says, as my poem is, so are my gods and so am I, the truth remains quiet and broods on what he has said. He knows that the gods of China are Chinese; that the gods of Greece are always Greeks and that all gods are created in the images of their creators; and he see in these circumstances the operation of a sytle, a basic law. He observes the uniform enhancement of all things within the category of the imagination. He sees, in the struggle between the perfectible and the imperfectible, how the perfectible prevails, even though it falls short of perfection." -- "Two or Three Ideas"

( more Stevens goodies )