💬 Finished reading: Conversation in the Mountains: Collected Prose of Paul … by Paul Celan 📚
>“Once the poem is really there, the poet is dismissed, is no longer privy.”
>“Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e. a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic differences between a handshake and a poem.”
>“Poems are also gifts—gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies.”
>“It begins, in Germany, here, today, with the Individual. May we spread a fourth possibility.”
>“La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose."
>“Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself.”
>“A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think are at stake, in a poem… racked by reality and in search of it.”