I have been looking for a quote from the Rosy Crusifixtion by Henry Miller that speaks to the point that writers must live their lives and not just write all the time. All I remember is that Miller was not worried (or may have been at some point and shirked the worry) about writing every single day. Living was important and he would trust that memory would serve him by acquiring the bits that were important to remember at any given time.
It could be that the passage from which I crave quotes is close to this one (which is one of my all time favorite quotes, as I deem the words words to live by):
"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music--the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Although I did not find the quote that I wanted, tonight (and I'm turning in soon since I've been up since 3a.m.), I did find the following about poets and thought I would post it here for safe keeping:
“Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.”
― Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud
Further, as a sort of side note, the above picture was found with this blog which I would follow, were it not dead.
I love this quote from Mark Strand's The Weather of Words:
I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?
The quote makes me happy, giddy, really and it also reminds of the following quote from Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual:
Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.
I like adding to energy, and creating poems to the whole process of creation seems like adding energy to me. Further, all of this rings of some kind of spiritual and moral life. These things are also close to my heart. I live a life of some sort of spiritual discipline, hoping to add to the good in the world.
There are so many arguments that poetry is dead but I don't think that is true. It's not just these quotes that make me think that but the way in which I see poetry working in the communities around me. I see poetry as a healing conduit, a way that people connect, share, vent, transform, understand, make connections and build dialogues. Perhaps what is dead is the ego in poetry. The Poet's work is for all not just for one. I think it's probably always been that way, despite any of our initial hope and search for glory.
