Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness"

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie

Quote: Hans Loewald

" ... analysts all too frequently fall into the error of regarding fantasy as being opposed to reality, as something to be eventually discarded or relegated to a psychic enclave.  But fantasy is unreal only insofar as its communication with present actuality is inhibited or severed.  To that extent, however, present actuality is unreal too.  Perhaps a better word than 'unreal' is 'meaningless'"

from 'Psychoanalysis as an Art' in Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980)

Quote: Eileen Myles

"Rumi had someone following him around all day long, while he spoke the poem.  He was simply in it.  I was in it too. The room was the poem, the day I was in.  Oh Christ.  What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer.  Poetry is just the performance of it.  These little things, whether I write them or not.  That's the score.  The thing of great value is you.  Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live."

from Inferno: (A Poet's Novel) 2010

'Ars Poetica' by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   

But be.

Quote: Tennessee Williams

'Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.'

from 'The Night of the Iguana'