Kieslowski on the World

Krzysztof Kieslowski: Everyone wants to change the world whenever they make the effort to do something. I don't think I ever believed the world could be changed in the literal sense of the phrase. I thought the world could be described.

Stephen Dobyns on Yannis Ritsos

Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment in Best Words, Best Order (1996) by Stephen Dobyns:

For Ritsos, what is important is that a connection is made between human beings and that our lives have been increased. This is his business as a poet: to help us live by awakening us to something beyond the mundane, by trying to connect us to a mystery that his poems celebrate.

The Meaning of Simplicity from Ritsos in Parentheses (1979) translated by Edmund Keeley:

I hide behind simple things that you may find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
the imprints of our hands will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a pewter pot (it becomes like this because of what I tell you)
it lights up the empty house and the kneeling silence of the house--
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a way out
for an encounter often canceled,
and it's then a word is true, when it insists on a meeting.

Three more from The Negatives of Silence (1987).

Douglas Dunn on Creative Writing Programmes

[pdf] Douglas Dunn interview (The Dark Horse, 1999) by Gerry Cambridge:

DD: A lot of reviewing in the literary magazines as opposed to the newspapers, strikes me as being done by post-graduates who are actually printing a chunk of a thesis. By and large I think Universities are a good thing, because I work in one; but their influence on literature is not always good. GC: Why? DD: It academises it. Full stop. Nothing more to say, really. So a writer who works in a university has to protect him or herself. Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside have just been appointed to the School of English in St Andrews, to teach creative writing. I’ll have to look after them. Make sure they don’t get into bad habits. GC: Was St Andrews the first University in Scotland to institute a degree in creative writing? DD: Yes. It’s a one year post-graduate course; it started in 1993. GC: In America creative writing courses are ubiquitous. Some critical opinion over there feels that’s a negative thing. If there were many more creative writing courses in Scottish Universities would it be healthy? DD: Perhaps not. But I don’t think every University needs to have one; there isn’t the market. We get by because we attract quite a lot of Americans who are disenchanted with what’s on offer in the USA. And they want to come and study at St Andrews, in a different culture. And it’s not sitting around talking about your feelings. If they do the poetry course with me then they have to learn versification, as well as study poetry of the past; one of the essays they have to write is on the history of Blank Verse, in Blank Verse. Or they could do a history of the rhyming couplet in rhyming couplets. GC: And how long does this history have to be? DD: At least 150 lines. GC: You mentioned earlier that some of these students can’t study Robert Frost at an American University. That seems an extraordinary situation. DD: Absolutely. If it continues, American culture, never mind American poetry, will go down the drain.

A Removal from Terry Street from Terry Street (1969):

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U.S. Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

More on Arlindo Correia with Portugese translations (2004).