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From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s, How Are Verses Made?:

1.  ”Where this basic dull roar of a rhythm comes from is a mystery.  I my case it’s all kinds of repetitions in my mind of noises, rocking motions, or in fact of any phenomenon with which I can associate a sound.  The sound of the sea, endlessly repeated, can provide my rhythm, or a servant who slams the door every morning, recurring and intertwining with itself, trailing through my consciousness; or even the rotation of the earth, which in my case, as in a shop full of visual aids, gives way to, and inextricably connects with the whistle of a high wind.”

2.  ”A poet regards every meeting, every signpost, every event in whatever circumstances simply as material to be shaped into words.”

“Andre Malraux (the autodidact writer turned minister of culture in the France of Charles de Gaulle) thought that the right to experience art individually, through a direct encounter with works of art and literature, was as important as the right to experience it collectively, through education. ‘Il y a la culture pour tous, et la culture pour chacun.’ There is a culture for all of us: what we are offered at schools and colleges—and then a culture for each one of us: what we get through, among other things, unique encounters with art, music and literature.” —from “Rendezvous with the Void” by Marc Valli

This riverbank thing (a rooty twang
in the subsoil) undoes all the years

Reels you over, the way willows hang
on the drift of a wrinkled likeness

Might things hold? Step down into a boat—
it gives, it wobbles but takes you on

& weighs a life (by heart) as you’d float
a nutshell. Old whelm of water. No

strange land to weep in remembering
parched ravines or the right hand’s cunning

losing it. Adrift now, marveling
where this stone bridge quotes itself deeply.

by Jennie Feldman (Oxford, 2010)