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

mistranslations result in beauty

19

Blind children studying the hippopatamus

23 SEP 2026

Marcel Proust
as quoted by Gilles Deleuze
in Dialogues II

“Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty.”

18

Dorothea Lange
"A Sign of the Times—Depression
Mended Stockings, Stenographer
San Francisco, 1934"

“whatever you have to say, leave the roots on,
let them
dangle

And the dirt

       Just to make clear
       where they come from—”

20 SEP 2026

—Charles Olson
from "These Days"

inner madman

17

From How to Become a Star, Licedei Theatre (1986)

“He who hides his madman, dies voiceless.”

19 SEP 2026

—André Gide
from Le traite du Narcisse

thinking poem

16

Luke Stephenson, "An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds"

19 SEP 2026

Lisa Robertson
from an interview in the
Northern Poetry Review

“I just try to make a poem that can think its own thoughts.”