Notes on Writing: Juan Gelman

"Poetry is charred speech. Its words rise from those ashes that some call silence, but that twist and even crackle nonetheless."

Juan Gelman, the Argentinian poet, in a 1999 interview, quoted December 30, 2012 in  El País (not on their web).

Dyer on Tarkovsky

"We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness."
 Geoff Dyer 

From his book Zona, dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), quoted in The New York Times review on March 2nd. I am not a Tarkovsky fan but this is a useful motto.

Image from Brian Dillon's interesting blog Ruins of the 20th Century

William S. Burroughs

"He believed that language was a virus that had achieved equilibrium with its human host, and that “blocks” of language and thought enforced convention, making it necessary to find techniques, from cut-ups to e-meters, to break the patterns."

From Luc Santes' review of  Rub Out the Words. The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959-1974 in this Sunday's New York Times.


Photo source: UBO (Unidentified Blog Object)