Jed Hoyland

'poetry exposes thinking to language, to its strangeness or otherness, its refusal to be contained within categories and propositions, its irreducibility to sameness and identity, its resistance to sense - in short, its denial of our efforts to speak it. Philosophy by contrast is thinking that closes itself off to the experience with language, turns itself over to logic, tries to protect itself by bringing language under the control of the proposition. Poetry, of course, knows no such control; poetry is the letting-go of language.'

Bruns, G, Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry, Yale University Press New Haven, 1989, p.xxiv-xxv

Pebble

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Zbigniew Herbert The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, 2007, Ecco, Harper Collins, New York, p.197.

“It is the typography that explores the topography, the questing word that uncovers the inscrutable world. More, powerfully than answers, which represent immobility, sedentariness, closure, and completion, the question in its essential nomadism can open doors, point the way, reveal the path to follow. The question follows a quest not for an answer but for deeper and more difficult questions. Questioning is a form of existence, a mode of being in the world. Through the question one touches the mystery of life.”

Stamelman, R, “The Graven Silence of Writing” in From The Book To The Book, Edmond Jabes, Weslayan University Press, New England, 1991, p.xiii.

“So that there is nothing at the beginning, nothing at the end but a procedure caught in its hesitations and turns.”

Jabes, E, From The Book To The Book, Weslayan University Press, New England, 1991, p.120.