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In Life


the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings:
no one has yet to begin a life who will not end it.



In Poetry
the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that
we cannot even conceive of it.

not every poem is finished –
one poem is abandoned,
another catches fire and is carried away by the wind,
which may be an ending, but it is the ending
of a poem without an end. 



Paul Valéry
The French poet and thinker, once said that
no poem is ever ended, that every poem is merely abandoned.

This saying is also attributed to Stéphane Mallarmé, for where quotations begin is
in a cloud.

He also described his perception of first lines
so vividly, and to my mind so accurately,
that I have never forgotten it:

the opening line of a poem, he said, is like
finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of
fallen fruit you have never seen before,
and the poet’s task is to create the tree
from which such a fruit would fall.

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In the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those
words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in
the beginning was the Act.
that nothing can precede action —
no breath before act,
no thought before act,
no pervasive love
before some
kind of
act.



I believe the poem is an act of the mind.
I think it is easier to talk about the end of a poem
than it is to talk about its beginning.
Because the poem ends on the page,
but it begins off the page, it begins in the mind.
The mind acts, the mind wills a poem,
often against our own will;
somehow this happens, somehow a poem gets written
in the middle of a chaotic holiday partythat has just run out of ice,
and it's your house.




log off, let's go party!