Dintr-un deşert

Îl intreb uneori: Ce-i, Boaz? Răspunde: Nimic. Mă atrage felul ăsta de-a fi: parcă nu ar avea nimic al lui, personal, parcă ar veni direct dintr-un deşert de singurătate.

(Amos Oz, Între prieteni)

Mătase indeşirabilă

" Eu sunt într-adevăr fascinat de viaţă, Helmut, poţi să mă crezi. Când mă plesneşte pe piele un strop de ploaie, aş putea să ţip de entuziasm. Când mă uit la un copac, aş putea să ţip de iubire pentru clorofilă. Dar mi-e frică să nu mă prostesc. Sunt în primejdie, ştiu asta. Aş vrea să rămân briant, înţelegi. Strălucit. Şi fin. Penetrant de fin. Aş vrea să fiu mătase indeşirabilă.

( Martin Walser, Cal în fugă )

poem & tea

“In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.”

—Anne Carson

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a fragrance of understanding

dintr-un interviu cu poeta canadiana Anne Carson:

INTERVIEWER

There was a line that stopped me right in the middle of that poem: “My personal poetry is a failure.” It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal poetry? And do you really feel it’s a failure or is that a function of the persona of the poem?

CARSON

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem who’s lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it’s also true of me as me.

INTERVIEWER

When you look back on ”The Glass Essay” do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?

CARSON

I see it as a messing around on upper levels with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote things like “The Glass Essay” I also wanted to do something that I call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did. I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if I read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot describing emotional facts of people, it seems there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think you don’t feel it because even though you’ve written about it, it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?

CARSON

Well that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?

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