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New and Selected Essays QUOTES

New and Selected Essays QUOTES

1 " so many writers and readers, that “deep spiritual longing” Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both writer and reader, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world —a criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to receive. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays

2 " He quotes Ezra Pound saying in a 1948 manifesto, “You must understand what is happening”; and makes it clear the significant emphasis is on “what is happening,” the presentness, the process. “Most verse,” Duncan comments, “is something being made up to communicate a thing already present in the mind— or a lot of it is. And don’t pay the attention it shld to what the poet don’t know—and won’t [know] until the process speaks. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays

3 " I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride'--hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays

4 " The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry. To use it is to misuse it. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays

5 " Hugh Kenner, in a lecture, beautifully defined what poets seek if they really are poets) as “the power to make things as moving as the things they have been moved by. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays

6 " Like everyone else I needed occasional reassurance, a word of approval, a warning against some weakness; but I knew, somehow, what Rilke’s words now stated for me, that the underlying necessity was to ask not others but oneself for confirmation. And he specified the primary question not as “Is what I have written any good?” but rather, “Must I write?” I came at some point to recognize that when he says Herr Kappus ought to continue only if he could honestly answer “Yes,” he meant the question (for every poet) to be a perennial one, not something asked and settled once and for all. Likewise, when, in the same letter, he states that “a work of art is good only if it has grown out of necessity,” he is not merely repeating that injunction; the first imperative had to do with an initial sense of being inexorably drawn to the making of poems, while this second one demands that the poet apply the same standard to each separate work. "

― Denise Levertov , New and Selected Essays