Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Interpretation
Poetry is more about the perspective and experience of life than just the physical act of writing.
In this quote, Joseph Brodsky highlights the essence of poetry, emphasizing that it is not merely a collection of written words but a way of engaging with and interpreting the world around us. Poetry serves as an approach to understanding life, suggesting that the feelings and sentiments captured in poetry are more significant than the technical aspects of its creation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a poetry workshop to inspire participants to connect with their emotions.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
Inspiring music may fill the soul with heavenly thoughts, move one to righteous action, or speak peace to the soul.
What I am after, above all, is expression.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.
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