Quotes About Mandelstam

Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Srinagar hunches like a wild cat: lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city's bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, sometimes with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps rush by. The candles go out as travelers, unable to light up the velvet Void. What is the blesséd word? Mandelstam gives no clue. One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.

Mandelstam wrote of the Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle – in the 'what ought to be.

The fear that goes with the writing of verse has nothing in common with the fear one experiences in the presence of the secret police. Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction.