“Music could easily have a statement attached to each note in the manner of words, so that C-natural might mean the sun, etc., and completely dull treatises be played – and even sciences finally expounded in tunes. Solid writing, however, tends to use the word ‘as reality’ rather than ‘as symbol.’ There is a ‘special’ place where poems, as all works of art, must occupy, but it is quite definitely the same place as that where bricks or colored threads are handled.”
— William Carlos Williams
“Well this thing where one poet published for other poets doesn’t tempt me, doesn’t lure me, only drives me to bury myself deep in nature’s woods, before a rock or a wave, far from the printing houses, from the the printed page… Poetry has lost its ties with the reader, he's out of reach... it has to get him back… it has to walk in the darkness and encounter the heart of man, the eyes of woman, the strangers in the streets who, at twilight or in the middle of the starry night feel the need for at least one line of poetry.”
— Pablo Neruda, Memoirs
"...what a man working with his hands might generate, concentrating his reflections in the course of some practical task. It’s not a 'literary’ form, though Thoreau used it as a literary base, polishing aphorisms until they sometimes resemble souvenirs..."
— Hugh Kenner
“The fire confined to the fireplace was no doubt for man, the first object of reverie… One can hardly conceive of a philosophy of repose that would not include a reverie before a flaming fire… Fire is, for man who is contemplating it, an example of sudden change. Less monotonous and less abstract than flowing water, even more quick to grow and change than the young bird we watch every day in its nest in the bushes, fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all life to its conclusion, to its hereafter. In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating… it magnifies human destiny, it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of the log to the life of the world… The logʼs destruction is more than a change, it is a renewal. Love death and fire are united in the same moment… To lose everything in order to gain everything. The lesson taught by fire is clear: after having gained all through skill, through love, through violence, you must give up everything.”
— Gaston Bachelard
“From the moment we learn to write the words we speak and hear, we sense the inklayer of language that lies beneath our thoughts. When we choose the mystery of the tattoo, the inklayer appears in our skin. When we write a poem it is on our hands. We may hide in this circumfusion, like the cuttlefish, secret in his inky cast. Poems do refer to a personal world, but the spaces around the words, the space inside the letters, must not be blank spaces, but places in the real world. My poems are designed and installed like gauges to give direct readings of their surroundings in real time, in the present tense. There is a here here, I hope, where text and context may lie down together.”
— Mark Mendel, 1982
“I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction.”
— Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture
“Our hands got to be this way by doing certain things a long time. The hand must still do those things or it isn’t what it can be.”
— Gary Snyder
“Art in nature is open to all the confused longings and idealizations our culture lays over nature itself. Art outdoors – in streets, parks, gardens, or fields – is a particularly effective vehicle for communicating these discoveries. It can be more intimate and accessible, closer to people’s lives, than art seen in brutally hierarchal buildings (museums look like courthouses, schools, or churches) or in elegant exclusive settings (commercial galleries look like rich people’s living rooms). Nature on some level is still felt to belong to all of us. Art in nature or in the local community becomes more familiar a part of daily life, simulating though not replicating the role of art in other times.
Artists are… repossessing the means of communication by going directly to their audiences. There is still the possibility that when art is accessible – not necessarily to huge numbers, but to a cross-cultural, cross-class, audience – some viewers will be so directly touched by the experience that they will be led to make esthetic personal or political statements of their own.”
— Lucy R. Lippard, Excerpt from the introduction to Overlay 1983