Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry Book

I totally expected to dislike this book and make a lot of smarmy comments about it. I have to admit I enjoyed the entire reading experience. It's a bit of new agey, Buddhisty foolishness, but entertaining. I especially enjoyed all the quotes, a rundown of all of my favorites.

Here are a few:

Genius is "not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances."--Sartre.

Image-making "is primarily a discipline of rightness."--Wallace Stevens.

"Just a turn of the doorknob, and there lies freedom."--Emily Dickinson.

"the capacity for a productive reaction against one's training."--Bernard Berenson's definition of genius in painting.

"Res tene, verba sequentur."--Cato the Elder.

"Perception is not whimsical, but fatal."--Emerson.

"Behind each jewel are three thousand sweating horses."--some Zen dude.

"Has this poet something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before, and has he found, not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying."--T. S. Eliot.

"How to Write Like Somebody Else"--The title of an essay by Theodore Roethke about modeling writers from the past until you learn your craft. The writer will become "more himself--or more than himself."

"Make it new."--Ezra Pound.

"Make it strange."--Leo Tolstoy.

"There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness. This is complete understanding."--Dogen.

"Traddutore, traditore."--Italian saying.

"Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry."--Yang Wan-li.

"The poetry is what gets lost in translation."--Robert Frost.

"The poetry is what gets transformed."--Octavio Paz's response.

"Unless there is a new mind, there cannot be a new line."--William Carlos Williams.

"Hearing the cuckoo,
even in Kyoto,
I long for Kyoto."--Basho.

"To generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone distinction of merit."--Blake.

"Death is the mother of Beauty."--Stevens.

"No."--Basho's response to a student who asked him, "Don't you mean too objective or too subjective?" after Basho had said the error in most poems is they are either objective or subjective.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Daedalus renounce family, country, religion, all things familiar to him to take up his new path as an artist with "the only arms I allow myself to use: silence, exile, and cunning."

"All perceiving is also thinking; all reasoning is also intuition; all observation is also invention."--Rudolph Arnheim in Art and Visual Perception.

He also says, "Eyesight is insight."

"Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness."--Novalis

"Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth."--Ludwig Wittgenstein.

"We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are."--Talmudic saying.

"Result of chance; fruit of calculation."--Octavio Paz's description of a poem.

"I hate and I love.
Ask, if you wish,
why this is so--
I can't say.
But I feel it
and I am in torment."--Catallus.

"The more deeply we are our true selves, the less self is in us."--Meister Eckhart.

"Every angel is terrifying."--Rilke.