From Derek Walcott's Nobel Lecture

 

“Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.”

an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture,

Survival is the triumph of stubborness, and spiritual stubborness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together can go under one collective noun: “the world”.

 For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

Joseph Brodsky's booklist

A list of books from here and here that Josph Brodsky recommends to his students:

1.   Bhagavad Gita

2.   Mahabharata

3.   Gilgamesh

4.   The Old Testament

5.   Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

6.   Herodotus: Histories

7.   Sophocles: Plays

8.   Aeschylus: Plays

9.   Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)

10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

11. Plato: Dialogues

12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima

13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology

14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]

16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics

17. Tacitus: Annals

18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores

19. The New Testament

20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars

21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

22. Catullus: Poems

23. Horace: Poems

24. Epictetus: Discourses

25. Aristophanes: Plays

26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals

27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica

28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

30. Plotinus: The Enneads

31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History

32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy

33. Pliny the Younger: Letters

34. Byzantine verse romances

35. Heraclitus: Fragments

36. St. Augustine: Confessions

37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica

38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers

39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince

40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)

41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle

42. Icelandic sagas

43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)

44. François Rabelais

45. Francis Bacon

46. Martin Luther: Selected Works

47. John Calvin:  Institutio Christianae religionis

48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays

49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

50. René Descartes: Discourses

51. Song of Roland

52. Beowulf

53. Benvenuto Cellini

54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams

55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan

56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées

57. John Milton: Paradise Lost

58. John Donne

59. Andrew Marvell

60. George Herbert

61. Richard Crashaw

62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises

63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard 

64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy

66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses

67.  Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters

68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government

69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics

71. David Hume: Everything

72. The Federalist Papers

73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments

75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed

76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey

78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis

80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico

81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude

82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies

83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

A list full of classics. Perhaps a work of a lifetime reading. I am a slow reader and some of these are difficult, contextual texts. I tried reading Dante's a few times, but I cannot proceed beyond a few cantos. The logic of that whole world escapes me. The logic of submission of human life or death to something as random... but I guess one has to read for poetry. Or perhaps one needs a teacher to introduce to these texts. Another strategy could be to begin from the bottom of the list, and work the way upwards. 

The idea is perhaps to be open to the best thought and poetry, and read it for what it is without judgement. 

A simpler, less aspirational me would just gaze at this list and smile to the variety of world and the aspirations inherent in it. Some of it I'll try to work through but knowing my past attempts, knowing myself, knowing my inclinations, I'll perhaps pick a few accessible titles from the above. Part of me wishes to take up the challenge, part of me knows that some challenges are good as distant mountains to guide your effort along the paths you are, you get there when you get there... the guidance is to the effort, the path in front of you. So to that, and in that spirit, this reading list.

Poets, Critics and Readers

Some fragments from Randall Jarrell's 'Poets, Critics and Readers'

Goethe notes : "All great excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator; only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Mediocrity, on the other hand, may often give us unqualified pleasure; it does not disturb our self-satisfaction, but rather encourages us with the thought that we are as good as another . .. Properly speaking, we learn only from those books we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticize would have to learn from me.”

--

But this is quite as true of critics and the poems that are their  patients: when one reads as a linguist, a scholar, a New or Old or High  or Low critic, when one reads the poem as a means to an end, one is no longer a pure reader but an applied one. The true reader “listens like a three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his will.” Later on he may write like a sixty-three-year-old sage, but he knows that in the beginning, unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of art. Hofmannsthal says, with awful finality: “The world has lost its innocence, and without innocence  no one creates or enjoys a work of art”; but elsewhere he says more hopefully, with entire and not with partial truth, that each of us lives in an innocence of his own which he never entirely loses.

--

perhaps true criticism is something, like sincerity or magnanimity, that cannot be aimed at, attained, directly; that must always be, in some sense, a by-product, whether of writing or reading, of a private poetry-workshop or a private reading-room.

--

We all realize that writers are inspired, but helpless and fallible beings, who know not what they write; readers, we know from personal experience, are less inspired but no less helpless and fallible beings, who half the time don’t know what they’re reading. Now, a critic is half writer, half reader:

--

For to tell the truth, the first truth, the poem is a love affair between the poet and his subject, and readers come in only a long time later, as witnesses at the wedding...

But what would the ideal witnesses—the ideal public—be? What would an ideal public do? Mainly, essentially, it would just read the poet; read him with a certain willingness and interest; read him imaginatively and perceptively. It needs him, even if it doesn’t know that; he needs it, even if he doesn’t know that. It and he are like people in one army, one prison, one world: their interests are great and common, and deserve a kind of declaration of dependence. ‘The public might treat him very much as it would like him to treat it. It has its faults, he has his; but both “are, after all,” as a man said about women, “the best things that are offered in that line.” The public ought not to demand the same old thing from the poet whenever he writes something very new, nor ought it to complain, The same old thing! whenever he writes something that isn’t very new; and it ought to realize that it is not, unfortunately, in the writer’s power to control what he writes: something else originates and controls it, whether you call that something else the unconscious or Minerva or the Muse. The writer writes what he writes just as the public likes what it likes; he can’t help himself, it can’t help itself, but each of them has to try: most of our morality, most of our culture are in the trying.

We readers can be, or at least can want to be, what the writer himself would want us to be: a public that reads a /ot—that reads widely, joyfully, and naturally; a public whose taste is formed by acquaintance with the good and great writers of many ages, and not simply acquaintance with a few fashionable contemporaries and the fashionable precursors of those; a public with broad general expectations, but without narrow particular demands, that the new work of  art must satisfy; a public that reads with the calm and ease and independence that come from liking things in themselves, for themselves.

This is the kind of public that the poet would like; and if it turned out to be the kind of public that wouldn’t like him, why, surely that is something he could bear. It is not his poems but poetry that he wants people to read; if they will read Rilke’s and Yeats’s and Hardy’s poems, he can bear to have his own poems go unread forever. He knows that their poems are good to read, and that’s something he necessarily can’t know about his own; and he knows, too, that poetry itself is good to read—that if you cannot read poetry easily and naturally and joyfully, you are cut off from much of the great literature  of the past, some of the good literature of the present. Yet the poet could bear to have people cut off from all that, if only they read widely, naturally, joyfully in the rest of literature: much of the greatest  literature, much of the greatest poetry, even, is in prose. If people read this prose—read even a little of it—generously and imaginatively, and felt it as truth and life, as a natural and proper joy, why, that would be enough.

Learning a new language...or a new paradigm

"In order to conquer any foreign language, one needs to open two princiapl doors. The first is comprehension. The second, the spoken language. In between, there are smaller doors, equally relevant: syntax, grammar, vocabulary, nuances of meaning, pronounciation.At this point, one gains relative mastery. In my case, I daed to open a third door: the written language.

Bit by bit, as one studies, the door to comprehension swings open. The spoken language, apart from a foreign accent and some mispronouciations here and there, also opens with relative ease. The written language, certainly the most formidable door, remains ajar. Since I started thinking and writing in Italian only at the age of forty-five, I knocked on this door quite late, and it creaks a little. Although it welcomes me, it keeps odd hours, and is rather unpredictable."

- From Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Translating Myself And Others'

Both an inspiration and an overview of how to tackle a foreign language or for that matter, a shift in skills, paradigms, anything that the mind has never grappled with before. Comprehension, conversation and then owning and writing in it... 

A part of the universe

A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

-ALBERT EINSTEIN

A Tibetan woman

From Sky Burial (Xinran), following about a Tibetan woman. Inspiring!

Saierbao's face was so weathered that it was hard to tell how old she was, but Wen guessed she must be about thirty. She was an extremely calm and dignified woman who seemed to savor all her chores, however tough and exhausting they were. She never shouted or scolded. Even if someone knocked over her freshly made tsampa or spilled her milk tea, she didn't get cross. At most she would purse her lips and smile briefly as if she had seen it coming. Saierbo loved jewelry and draped herself in precious things even on ordinary days: with her necklaces, bracelets, and waist ornaments of agate, jade, gold, and silver, she was like a multicolored wind chime. Wen rarely saw Saierbo rest: her tinkling began the moment the first rays of light sneaked into the tent; at night, the whole family took its cue for sleep when the chimes fell silent.