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| CONTENTS |
Rebecca Solnit: “By redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values.”
Alice Oswald: ”At the heart of the poetry I am interested in there is a metaphysical idea of democracy. By democracy, I do not mean politics in a narrow sense. I mean that in my poems I try to give everything a voice, from the human to the tree to the insect. My deepest principle in a poem is listening and transmitting the voices of marginal characters.”
Zadie Smith: “The authority of tone. There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. You wanted to believe it. You needed proof. And not Victorian proof. Didion—like her contemporary Toni Morrison—became Exhibit A. Uniquely, she could be kept upon your person, like a flick knife, stuffed in a back pocket, the books being so slim and portable. She gave you confidence. Shored you up.”
Rainer Marie Rilke: “If the Angel deigns to come it will because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.”
Christopher Ricks: “Gratitude is among those human accomplishments that literature lives to realize. Art enjoys the power not only to voice gratitude but to prompt it, even to restore us to a state in which grateful might come again to mean at once feeling gratitude and feeling pleasure—as though it once was, and ought always to be, impossible to be granted something gratifying and not be grateful for it.”
Helen Vendler: “There’s nothing more interesting to me, whether in an old poet or a new poet, than figuring out why something has come alive, why somebody has been able to take a blank piece of paper and make something excitingly volatile and surprising all the time, where you don’t know what is going to happen next.”
Kafka: “The truth is always an abyss. One must—as in a swimming pool—dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again—laughing and fighting for breath—to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
Simone Weil: “One thing alone mattered in the world today: the revolution that would feed all people on earth.”
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