Ruby Street

"Everything that exists is situated. ..." Max Jacob , in preface to Le cornet à dés , 1916.

"The arrangement, which is the life of a poem, includes music and meaning, the immediately experienced and the relations of ideas. The process of arrangement, or creation, is an essential and subtle one." Muriel Rukeyser , The Life of Poetry , Paris Press, 1996.

'Poetry seems often a talking to self as well as other as well as self as other, a simultaneity that recognizes the elusive multiplicity of what is called "identity." ' Michael Palmer , "Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment", in Bob Perleman, ed. Writing / Talks , Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

"The more daily life is eroded ... the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatiary sets of rules ... A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into play and produce vertigo." Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil: Or the Lucidity Pact , (trans Chris Turner)

Questa sfera arida parte ogni discorso e ogni poema; e ogni viaggio attraverso foreste battaglie tesori banchetti alcove ci riporta qui, al centro d'un orizzonte vuoto. "From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the centre of an empty horizon." Italo Calvino , The Castle of Crossed Destinies (translation by William Weaver)

Reversal is the movement of the Way; Weakness is the usage of the Way. All creatures under heaven are born from being; Being is born from nonbeing. Lao Tzu , Tao Te Ching (trs Victor H. Mair)

"In intention, the ego progressively loses its ego individual character and finds itself carried to a universal value that makes it escape from the strictly ego form of the ego . It is, nonetheless only through intention that the formless ego becomes self-consciousness. Thus the ego is a transient fact, not only as a result of its chance birth and its approaching death, but also because the process that determines it is also the one that exhausts it. it is impossible even to reach a clear distinction between determination and exhaustion. The determined ego is, by the sheer fact of determination, an exhausted ego." Georges Bataille , Critique of Heidegger from Bataille's original manuscript, Biblioteque Nationale de France (trs Stefanos Geroulanos). In October 117 , Summer 2006.

The Trees "Because we are like tree trunks in the snow. They appear to lie smoothly, and with a small shove one should be able to push them away. No, it is impossible because they are firmly bound to the earth. But see, even that is only appearance." Kafka , 'The Trees', from Contemplation , (trs Kevin Blahut)

"The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities - even the poetry of nothingness - issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world." Calvino - on Lucretius, from Six memos for the next millennium .

CA Conrad: "If you start a poem you start from where you are, which is where everything wound up." Every SINGLE thing that went into making you as you are at this moment is in some way responsible for what kind of poetry comes out of you. An absolute must-read interview over at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.