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A review by interrobang
Inferno by Eileen Myles
4.0
this is such a good read for a time in my life where I am trying to figure out how to be a poet. here are some quotations I like from it about poetry so I can save them and also return this to the library because it's due tomorrow:
p. 52: "Poetry readings were like early teevee in that everyone had their own little show. Though teevee got more sophisticated (worse) poetry never did. It remains stupid, run by fools. It's the only way to hold it open."
p. 108: "I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that short thing out."
p. 224 (a comparison to Hart Crane) "There's one picture of me when I was thirteen sitting with my friends and I was doing it. Looking through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture actually seem to be in the world. They're stopping the balloon from floating off."
(and I think I marked this because it resembles my favorite line in Wittgenstein's Mistress: "All that looking compressed in a poem."
p. 261: "The poem was a grid– that swayed and moving through it you just picked up things and hung them on the grid all the while singing your broken heart out. Humming. It was a deep deep grey. In that place (and poetry most of all is a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form in your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back) each of these series of occurrences creates a season. The seasons grow huge (til they die) and in each you create a new sense of what the poem is in relation to the space of your mind, heart, that kind of substance."
p. 52: "Poetry readings were like early teevee in that everyone had their own little show. Though teevee got more sophisticated (worse) poetry never did. It remains stupid, run by fools. It's the only way to hold it open."
p. 108: "I mean and I would definitely say poetry is a very roundabout way to unite both work and time. A poet is a person with a very short attention span who actually decides to study it. To look. To draw that short thing out."
p. 224 (a comparison to Hart Crane) "There's one picture of me when I was thirteen sitting with my friends and I was doing it. Looking through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture actually seem to be in the world. They're stopping the balloon from floating off."
(and I think I marked this because it resembles my favorite line in Wittgenstein's Mistress: "All that looking compressed in a poem."
p. 261: "The poem was a grid– that swayed and moving through it you just picked up things and hung them on the grid all the while singing your broken heart out. Humming. It was a deep deep grey. In that place (and poetry most of all is a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form in your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back) each of these series of occurrences creates a season. The seasons grow huge (til they die) and in each you create a new sense of what the poem is in relation to the space of your mind, heart, that kind of substance."