29

“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

Photographer Unknown

30 SEP 2026

—Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

your own voice

28

Friederike Pezold - Mundwerk, 1974-1975

28 SEP 2026

widely attributed to Allen Ginsberg
original context unclear

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”

task failed successfully

27

“When shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin?”

28 SEP 2026

—Kenneth Grahame
from “Marginalia,” in Pagan Papers, 1898

holy text

26

“Take that which comes without a price tag and cherish it as a holy text.”

attribution unknown
—
Douglas' essay here

28 SEP 2026

- Walker Douglas
“Dharma on No Dollars a Day”
in Tricycle Magazine

shining words

25

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

Carl Andre – foot 1963

26 SEP 2026

—widely attributed to Emily Dickinson
original context unclear

the smallest things

24

Attribution Unknown

“‘Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.’”

26 SEP 2026

—A.A. Milne
from Winnie the Pooh

milk into milk

23

Annotated photo by Allen Ginsberg
of artist Harry Smith
"transforming milk into milk," 1985

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”

26 SEP 2026

—Italo Calvino
from Six Memos for the Next Millennium

universe of qualties (words)

22

First page of Vladimir Nabokov’s first draft of
Invitation to a Beheading

26 SEP 2026

Clark Coolidge
from his contributor's note to
Paul Carroll's anthology
The Young American Poets, 1968

“Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.”

Desire ≠ Comma

21

Attribution unknown

“You mean that’s your idea of desire, with all those commas?”

25 SEP 2026

—Michael Palmer
from “Idem 1”

press of my foot

20

Dongshan, Jiangsu Province, China, 1981, photographer unknown

“The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.”

24 SEP 2026

—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself