Spring and All

It is at the edge of the petal that love waits

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

If anything of the moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

stockings, shoes, hairpins your bed, I wrapped myself round you –

It lives as pictures only can : by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky...

To hell with you and your poetry — You will rot and be blown through the next solar system with the rest of the gases —

Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself - sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.

In my life the furniture eats me the chairs, the floor the walls which heard your sobs drank up my emotion- they which alone know everything and snitched on us in the morning-

Black wind, I have poured my heart out to you until I am sick of it- Now I run my hand over you feeling the play of your body - the quiver of it's strength-

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.

First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose. The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience – (said that half a dozen times already).

...and that beauty is related not to loveliness but to a state in which reality plays a part

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates

But though I have felt "free" only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it - It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but - As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose : to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not acurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist - Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment - Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination - the perfection of new forms as addition to nature - Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry - Is what I have written prose ? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated - If that power to go on falters in the middle of a sentence - that is the end of the sentence - Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on.

The sea that encloses her young. body ula lu la lu is the sea of many arms - The blazing secrecy of noon is undone and and and the broken sand is the sound of love -

prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts - technical expositions, jargon of all sorts - fictional and other - poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.