fbpx

Guy Davenport

Let the song lie in the thing! Besides, all things are sanctified by genius. In the last analysis, Kafka sighed, all things are miracles. Seeing at what they were looking / Let the audience look to their eyes. The jury of my senses and I said No.

1927-2005

“Let the Song Lie in the Thing”

—Hurrah!
—The arms with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.
—Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.

—There died yesterday, after a prolonged adolescence…
—A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
—Our salvation is death, but not this one.

—Can you recollect missing him.
—We are alien from everything that was most familiar.
—Include me out.

—Here is plenty of space.
—When we clasp our hands, our right thumbs and fingers should be above our left, as uniformity is comely.
—veracious page on page, exact

—You have a neat and attractive handwriting.
—O. is the easiest letter to write.
—That’s what poetry should look like on the page!

—love to lay a good foundation in the line of outward things
—No force however great can stretch a thread however fine into a horizontal line that is absolutely straight.
—Regard the bent wings, Tatlin says.

—BAD DOG
—crinkle-crankle
—potatoe

—HORSE: A neighing quadruped, used in war and draught and carriage.
—…the wallhall’s horrors of rollsrights, carhacks, stonengens, kisstvanes, tramtrees, fargobawlers, autokinotons, hippohobbilies, streetfleets, tournintaxes, megaphoggs, circuses and wardsmoats and basilikerks and aeropagods…
—The earliest indication of a mesoblast is manifested by a slight haziness at one single point within the ectoblast, close against its wall.

—Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle.
—The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.
—He wrote grammatical French.

—the pat of a shuttlecock, or the creaking of a jack
—He painted still-life, oranges and lemons, plate, damask curtains, cloths of gold, and that medley of familiar objects that strike the ignorant vulgar.
—The same anew.

—None of them knew the color of the sky.
—He put the red in the wrong place.
—Nature loves to hide.

—I found the poems in the fields
—Grass nowhere out of place.
—We must grasp nature, Cézanne said, as cylinder, sphere, cone.

—Let the song lie in the thing!
—Besides, all things are sanctified by genius.
—In the last analysis, Kafka sighed, all things are miracles.

—seeing at what they were looking
—Let the audience look to their eyes.
—The jury of my senses and I said No.

—a perfectly transparent plate-glass style, artless, with no ornaments
—infinitude confined
—His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.

—Light is time thinking about itself.
—The room is growing crepuscular.
—It is, Osip Mandelstam would say in later years, the quality of sunlight on a wall.

—He was younger than any of them.
—I am so happy.
—Now I understand.


If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.


Related Articles

January 14, 2021
Silver Screen
March 23, 2017

1929–2017

April 29, 2016
On Jenny Diski
Issue 33 Overtime
The Painful Sum of Things

More by this Author

October 9, 2004

Let it never be said that athletes know nothing: they know bodies as well as yogis and surgeons.

Issue 27 Deep End
Don't Be Scared, Homie