This was a chance to consider the complexity of simplicity—Agnes Martin’s statement is so simple, and yet her writings accumulate into great complexities. And happy—that word seems so simple, and yet what could have a more complex and radiant web of etymological associations? This conflation led me to a memory of something very simple that simply happened, in every sense of the word. It is, needless to say, dedicated to Happy. Cole Swensen on "The Goal" |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica Fisher on Language as Form
"When the voice began, it wasn’t mine, nor did it belong to anyone else in particular—it was instead something like the possibility of speech beginning again, after a period of long silence. Writing often begins for me with this form of potential opening, and the work is to follow the voice as it accrues—or, to follow its underlying rhythm. I love that the I/you relation so central to lyric poetry can accommodate a simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, that there doesn’t have to be any external circumstance to which the poem refers." |
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