SVVENIR :: with Amanita & Minou Oram
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“[Words] are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: “Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!”
It is the most fragile relationship in the world. Colette calls a poem “that secret, that dried rose, that scar, that sin.”
James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: “Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.”
In Hindu poetics, “a poem is recognised as such by those who have a heart.” If you do not have a heart, you cannot recognize a poem.
The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.” — Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
