[Guardian] He wrote the music for the second part of Phaedra after waking from a two-month-long near-coma in 2005. “The illness started when I was in London to hear a piece of mine. Suddenly I couldn’t walk. It was then that I stopped liking life.” There are long pauses in his conversation, punctuated by sips of his favourite cocktail, a mysterious green liqueur. After this first collapse, he came home to Rome. “I stopped eating, and I stopped speaking, and just lay flat in my bed. People thought it was . . . they thought the moment had come. And they came from everywhere, all over the world, from New York, for a funeral.” He laughs, gently but sardonically. Was he completely unconscious? He nods his head. “But the moments when people came to say goodbye, I sometimes felt them around me – and saw them, sort of. And then one morning, I just stood up. Fausto [Moroni, Henze's companion for 40 years] was amazed. So was I. And then I started writing again.” (read)
[Guardian] It would be hard to think of a worse title for a show than Earth: Art of a Changing World, no matter what side of the climate debate you are on. I approached the show with glumness and rancour. And, sure enough, there are some crashingly pious works on show – a globe of sizzling red neon, any number of rising tides, melting icebergs and industrially ravaged landscapes – but the good news is that the curators aim far higher than reportage. (read)
I should like to bring together, almost to identify, poetry and hope; but to do so indirectly, since there are two sorts of poetry, one of them chimerical and untrue and fatal, just as there are two sorts of hope.
I am thinking first of all about a great refusal. When we have to “take on a burden,” as is said of someone smitten with misfortune, when we have to face up to a person’s absence, to the deceitfulness of time, to the gulf that yawns in the very heart of presence or maybe of understanding, it is to speech that we turn as to a protected place. A word seems to be the soul of what it names, its ever-intact soul. And if it frees its object from time and space, those categories of our dispossession, it does so without impairing its precious essence and restores it to our desire. [...] One kind of poetry will always seek to detach itself from the world, to better grasp what it loves. And that is why it so readily becomes, or seems to become, a form of knowledge, since the anxious mind, separating what is from natural causality, immobilizing it in absolute form, can no longer conceive of any relation between things except by means of analogy and prefers to stress their “correspondences” and their remotely envisaged harmony rather than their obscure mutual antagonsim. Knowledge is the last resort of nostalgia. It emerges in poetry after defeat and might confirm our misfortune, but its ambiguity–its fallacious promise–lies in maintaining our awareness of the situation in which we were defeated, and even of its future, from which we expected so much and which has vanished.
Yves Bonnefoy
The Act and the Place of Poetry, pg. 101
At the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are grasped together by means of a kind of experience or knowledge which has no conceptual expression and is expressed only in the artist’s work. [...] in such an experience, creative in nature, Things are grasped in the Self and the Self is grasped in Things, and subjectivity becomes a means of catching obscurely the inner side of Things.
Jacques Maritain
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (pp. 29-30)
Local government officials in Ontario decided unexpectedly Monday night to grant protected status to one of Richard Serra’s most important early outdoor sculptures, “Shift,” a series of low concrete forms running through farmland now owned by a development company. The city council of King Township, north of Toronto, voted 6-1 to designate the work, completed in 1972, and some of the land around it as a protected cultural landscape under the Ontario Heritage Act, over the objections of the land’s owner, Hickory Hills Investments. (read more in NYTimes or The Globe & Mail)
“For who among us, who then, oh, who knows a rhyme for the rattle of lungs shot to pieces, a rhyme for the scream at the gallows, who knows the metre, the rhythm, for rape, who knows a metre for the bark of machine-guns [...]. Go home, poets, go into the forests, catch fish, chop wood and do your most heroic deed: be silent! Let the cuckoo cry of your lonely hearts be silent, for there’s no rhyme and no metre for it, and no drama, no ode and no psychological novel can encompass the cry of the cuckoo, and no dictionary and no press has syllables or signs for your wordless world-rage, for your exquisite pain, for the agony of your love.”
Wolfgang Borchert
(h/t roxana)
“There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.”
~George Oppen~
[NYTimes] “I don’t think of making pieces,” Sherman once wrote. “It’s what I do, but it’s the result of developing strategies for personal salvation, for escape from the intolerable, from certain existential cul-de-sacs.” (read)
