This Craft of Verse*

I've been reading Borges' This Craft of Verse this week, slowly working my way through chapters on the odd lunch break here and there. Thought I'd share a few of the best bits:

On poetry in general:

"Poetry is not alien--poetry is, as we shall see, lurking around the corner. It may spring on us at any moment."

"Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line does me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless."

"...we know what poetry is. We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color red or yellow, or the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, or of our love for our country. These things are so deep in us that they can be expressed only by those common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words?"

On metaphor:

"What is really important is the fact not that there are a few patterns, but that those patterns are capable of almost endless variations."


On the telling of a tale:

"...the ancients, when they spoke of a poet--a "maker"--thought of him not only as the utterer of those high lyric notes, but also as the teller of a tale. A tale wherein all the voices of mankind might be found--not only the lyric, the wistful,the melancholy, but also the voices of courage and hope."

"But perhaps (I may have said this before; I am sure I have), perhaps the intentions of the poet are not that important." (This really gets at one of the points I was trying to make in my earlier blog on workshopping)

And my personal favorite:

"Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books."

*title taken from a book of Borges' collected lectures.