In his "Manifesto of the Flying Mallet" in the Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry, Michael Hofmann writes:
[Poetry's] only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you.
Which reminds me of the end of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor," as Hofmann calls the story in his translation:
No one can make his way through there, much less with a message from a dead man. — But you, you will sit at your window and dream of it, as evening falls.
[And as I type in this little note I wrote the other day, this comes to mind.]
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In the "Eight Manifestos" in that issue of Poetry (of which Hofmann's is one), I also particularly enjoyed those by Charles Bernstein, A. E. Stallings, and D. A. Powell. Here are two good bits from Powell's:
But most of what makes a school truly interesting is what others say about it; not what it says about itself.
They [artists] want to belong to the outside, and yet to be recognized by the inside.
[Poetry's] only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you.
Which reminds me of the end of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor," as Hofmann calls the story in his translation:
No one can make his way through there, much less with a message from a dead man. — But you, you will sit at your window and dream of it, as evening falls.
[And as I type in this little note I wrote the other day, this comes to mind.]
*
In the "Eight Manifestos" in that issue of Poetry (of which Hofmann's is one), I also particularly enjoyed those by Charles Bernstein, A. E. Stallings, and D. A. Powell. Here are two good bits from Powell's:
But most of what makes a school truly interesting is what others say about it; not what it says about itself.
They [artists] want to belong to the outside, and yet to be recognized by the inside.
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