Podcast Quote-a-Thon

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and here are a few excerpts:

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From Tieferet Talk, Tieferet Journal's radio show,  an interview of Molly Peacock by host Melissa Studdard, about Peacock's book The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney Begins Her Life's Work at 72, which includes the following:

“You can't be jaded if you really attend to detail. Jaded means life is predictable. But life is not predictable in its exhilarating specificity…When you don’t understand the world and when you’re overwhelmed, one thing you can do is simply to describe it. If you describe it to yourself, it allows you at least to recognize it. You may not be able to comprehend it, but it’s there in front of you, in a palpable way that you are saying back to yourself.” Molly Peacock

“She didn’t meet the goal but she met her vision.” Molly Peacock

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From the New Letters on the Air podcast, the podcast of New Letters Magazine,  a posthumous re-airing of an interview of John Ciardi by host Angela Elam, including the following:


“I realized the photographer is photographing himself…..” John Ciardi

“…submit one’s self to it in the knowledge that the language is more wise more able than the practitioner…” John Ciardi


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From the podcast New Books in Poetry, an interview of James Longenbach with host John Ebersole about Longenbach's recent book The Virtues of Poetry, including the following:

 
"The idea that we are most likely going to be forgotten should liberate the artist and not constrain him or her." John Ebersole


"...the poet whose deepest inclination is to associate risk with submission...." James Longenbach, as quoted by John Ebersole, reading from Longenbach's book


“You can’t write poems all the time. You’ve got to read a hundred of them in order to write one that’s half -decent.” James Longenbach


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Most Like an Arch, This Poem

If you go to a children's science museum, chances are that there will be an interactive display for building an arch. There will be a base block which forms the outline of the arch, and loose blocks of various shapes that have to be stacked up and fitted together around and over the top of the base block till they lean tightly together, in a symmetrical outlay with the keystone piece in the middle. Once you have that configuration, you can pull out the base block and the arch will stay together, standing, remarkably stable and without any kind of adhesion holding it up other than the weight of the individual blocks pressed against one another.

Yesterday I was editing some poems, taking out as much of the excess wording and imagery as I could without causing the poem to collapse, and it occurred to me that what I was doing was like building an arch. The foundation, the original impulse around which the lines were placed, could eventually be removed entirely if each line was chosen and placed correctly so that its weight and position was necessary yet not excessive in its contribution to the poem. Everything else had to be deleted, leaving on the essential elements which leaned on one another, but didn't stand alone and demand their own attention.

Then, when all the excess was pulled out, if the poem remained standing, I got the feeling of pulling the base block out of an arch and with astonishment seeing the arch still remain. When you have that feeling, you have a poem.

(The title of this post is a play on John Ciardi's poem entitled "Most Like an Arch This Marriage.")