Quotations



Let us imagine a language ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein



If you want to tell me that the stars are not words,
then stop calling them stars.

Jack Kerouac




Er war ein Dichter und er hasste das Ungefähre...
He was a poet and he hated the inexact...

Rainer Maria Rilke





Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.

Raymond Radiguet









Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.

Paul Klee







La poesía, principio y fin de todo, es indefinible. Si se pudiera definir, su definidor sería el dueño de su secreto, el dueño de ella, el verdadero, el único dios posible. Y el secreto de la poesía no lo ha sabido, no lo sabe, no lo sabrá nunca nadie; ni la poesía admite dios, es Diosa única sin dios.

Poetry, the beginning and end of everything, is indefinable. If it could be defined, the one who defines it would be its master, the master of its secret, the only possible god. And the secret of poetry has never been known, is not known, will never be known; nor does poetry admit god, it is a Goddess without god.

Juan Ramón Jiménez









"Así sea la poesía que buscamos, gastada como por un ácido por los deberes de la mano, penetrada por el sudor y el humo, oliente a orina y a azucena, salpicada por las diversas profesiones que se ejercen dentro y fuera de la ley. Una poesía impura como un traje, como un cuerpo, con manchas de nutrición, y actitudes vergonzosas, con arrugas, observaciones, sueños, vigilia, profecías, declaraciones de amor y de odio, bestias, sacudidas, idilios, creencias políticas, negaciones, dudas, afirmaciones, impuestos."

"Let this be the poetry that we search for, worn by the work of hands as if by acids, steeped in sweat and smoke, smelling of urine and lilies, spattered by the diverse trades that we practise inside and outside the law. A poetry as impure as the clothes we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behaviour, our wrinkles, vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of love and loathing, idylls and brutalities, the shocks of encounter, political beliefs, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes..."

Pablo Neruda from "Towards an Impure Poetry"/ "Sobre un poesía sin pureza"

The poet is occupied with frontiers beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist.

T.S. Eliot









dichten = condensare

Ezra Pound

(Note: The German word for a poet is Dichter which comes from the verb dichten which means to thicken or condense. So a poet is described as one who thickens or condenses language. Condensare is the Italian verb meaning condense).

"There are two kinds of people: the type that is only interested in what they understand, and the type that wants at all costs the hermetic mystery, enigmas. The first gets bored when they don't understand, the second is bored when they do understand. Me, I accept poetry, the inexplicable. Things are born in this waiting."

Morton Feldman











"Who would the poet understand
Must go into the poet's land."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu..."

"To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe..."

Stéphane Mallarmé
from Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe

"History does not influence me: I influence history."

Willem de Kooning

"Is a musician conceivable who is no poet?
Is a poet conceivable who is no musician?"

Clemens Brentano, compiler of Des Knaben Wunderhorn




'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.'

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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