A Quote by Allen Grossman
The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
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I'm in a house where if the washing machine shuts off, it sings a song. If iPad gets a message, it sings a song. I'm living in a real postmodern time - every single thing sings to you to tell you it's started, it's stopped, you've got a message, you didn't get a message.
The door swung open and Kate walked in. Her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with blood and she was carrying a severed vampire head. The T-shirt has a smiley face on it.
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
Lilt pulled away. "I saw what he was doing, so I cleared a path for him. I helped him do it..." She shook her head, tears tracking the dust off her face, and turned to stare at the fallen tower. "Have we all gone mad to want this?
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
As Christians we are here to affirm the supreme value of direct sharing, of immediate encounter -not machine to machine, but person to person, face to face.
Man is born with his face turned away from God. When he truly repents, he is turned right round toward God; he leaves his old life.
I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.
Don’t keep your head turned backwards. Look ahead and move on. You are trying to walk forward with your head turned backward. This is why you feel miserable. Just let go!
I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to the sun.
I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.
The heart, in its journey to Allah, Majestic is He, is like that of a bird; Love is its head, and fear and hope are its two wings. When the head and two wings are sound, the bird flies gracefully; if the head is severed, the bird dies; if the bird loses one of its wings, it then becomes a target for every hunter or predator.
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