Lgbt People

"One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it."

"I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head."

"I find free verse very, very difficult to write."

"Great poems are all fables about life."

"Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem."

"Since he (Hollander) is a poet himself..he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration."

"Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems."

"A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively."

"Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive."

"I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud."

"Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself."

"The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud."

"Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow."

"Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself."

"Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind."

"You can teach the writing of verse..like prose..an instrument..and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach themselves."

"Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you."

"Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse."

"It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking.. .I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down."

"Cy Twombly was the first [artist], Robert Rauschenberg shared ideas with]. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact."

"For Twombly, the first thing is the line. It is something deliberately artificial and artistic. He has worked on his line, has made it supple enough to convey form, pace, depth and much else besides (Catlo Huber). The line, which Paul Klee called a path, a guide through the imaginary territory of the picture, becomes in Twombly's hands, a vibrant, autonomous, complex 'self' and 'other' that roams through wider and wider landscapes, spaces and processes. Or, as Twombly himself says: each line is the present expedience of its own inherent history.."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush.. .I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state."

"I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything."

"And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean [where Twombly is living later in his life], at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white.. .Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it."

"The curator [Varnedoe] somewhat underplays the vast impact of Twombly's early relationship with Rauschenberg.. .Varnedoe reminds us that the two artists met in the spring of 1951 after Twombly moved to New York and entered classes at the Art Students league, where the slightly older Rauschenberg [born in 1925] was also enrolled. Varnedoe maintains that it was probably Twombly who turned Rauschenberg on to Schwitters, rather than vice versa. But it was clearly Rauschenberg who convinced Twombly to join him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina for the summer of 1951. At Black Mountain the young artist was exposed to the teachings not only of Ben Shahn, whom he emulated in his spindly graphic style, and Robert Motherwell, who was one of his strongest early defenders and wrote the first catalogue essay about him, but John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson and Franz Kline.[2] A certain Cagean sense of flux, together with a kind of I Ching-influenced orientalism, would remain an undercurrent in Twombly's work, distancing it from the more purposeful and willfully heroic strokes of the Abstract Expressionists."

"It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task."

"I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties."

"When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length."

"Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape.. .All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.. .And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense."

"I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis."

"But on longer consideration the artist's role [of Twombly] as teacher can be seen as part of his ivory-tower position, a stance of highly selective accessibility that he has cultivated over the years. Since the late '50s younger artists have sought him out in Rome, including Jannis Kounellis in the late '50s, Alighiero e Boetti in the late '60s and Francesco Clemente in the '70s. Brice Marden, having worked for Rauschenberg in the '60s, was early drawn into the Twombly circle. In the early '80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler, James Brown, Julian Schnabel and w:Terry Winters all learned much from his art. (Twombly will reportedly appear in the same area as [Terry] Winters and [Brice] Marden in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.) Ross Bleckner's signature '80s image of chandeliers doubles back to Twombly's lost chandelier paintings of the early '50s, which Rauschenberg described in an interview with Barbara Rose. Both Philip Taaffe and Michele Zalopany followed Twombly's expatriate steps to Italy, where they became friends of the artist. In the '90s Suzanne McClelland [see A.i.A., Oct. '94] and Pat Steir each defined her stance in relation to his work. Thus at least three generations of very different artists have studied at the 'School of Twombly'."

"I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know."

"I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist."

"I show things in flux."

"To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release.By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse."

"I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements."

"For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)."

"In painting it is the forming of the image."

"Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957]."

"He's nothing. He's a liar. He's taken human lives. I feel sorry for his mother, to give birth to such a monster."

"No-one but Nilsen's lawyer and one or two close confidantes have read [his autobiography] (it's not published don't forget) so who the hell can say whether it "glorifies his crimes" or not? And even if it does, and that's honestly how he feels towards his actions, isn't that extremely interesting? Shouldn't the public and psychiatrists and forensic psychologists and criminal profilers be grateful for such a first-hand account and unashamed glorying of such a crime? To me such a book would be extremely useful and insightful to many people. So whether it glorifies the crimes or tries to explain them I think the book has every right to be published, and I think it's in the public interest to do so. For the argument that "it’s not in the victims' interest to do so” well, I don't believe that's true, but even if it were, I don't think a handful of bitter people (bitter for very good reason) should decide the fate of the nation. If the books published the victims have every right not to read it and the public has every right to boycott it, but it MUST be available. As my mother recently said: Why the fuck should he have his book published! Though yeah, if it were published I'd probably read it."

"[To] call Nilsen a monster is to avoid the issue. People identified as 'witches' were once burned without further ado, it being simpler to get rid of them than to examine the questions which their alleged conduct, and society's hysterical reactions to it, raised. Nilsen has done monstrous things, and the responsible attitude would be to study his personality probingly in the hope of finding out why. Not for his sake, to give him the chance of redemption, but for ours, to deepen our knowledge and improve the chances of detecting such an aberrant personality before it does harm and causes grief. If the death penalty were still in force, it would be idiotic to kill Nilsen, for that would be to destroy the only evidence worth exploring."

"I would say that he wanted the bodies to be there because it assured him how in control he was of other people. This is what is arousing to an individual like Nilsen; to be in complete control and domination of others."

"Many years ago I was a boy drowning in the sea. I am always drowning in the sea... down amongst the dead men, deep down. There is a peace in the sea back down to our origins... when the last man has taken his breath the sea will still be remaining. It washes everything clean. It holds within it forever the boy suspended in its body and the streaming hair and the open eyes."

"In those days I could hate Adam Scott very easily. I was, I suppose, very jealous of him having a relationship with and the attention of my mother. I sometimes felt that we, the Nilsen kids, were an impediment to her fulfillment in her new life and family. I was a very lonely and turbulent child. I inhabited my own secret world full of ideal and imaginary friends. Nature had mismatched me from the flock."

"I eased him into his new bed [beneath the floorboards] ... A week later, I wondered whether his body had changed at all or had started to decompose. I disinterred him and pulled the dirt-stained youth up onto the floor. His skin was very dirty. I stripped myself naked and carried him into the bathroom and washed the body. There was practically no discoloration and his skin was pale white. His limbs were more relaxed than when I had put him down there."

"My troubles started there. It blighted my personality permanently. I have spent all my emotional life searching for my grandfather and in my formative years no one was there to take his place. It is the custom up there in Fraserburgh that when there is a death in a household they draw the blinds and curtains. When my grandfather died it seemed that these blinds had been drawn across my life... Relatives would pretend that he had gone to a 'better place'. 'Why', I thought, 'should he go to a better place and not take me with him?' 'So death was a nice thing,' I thought. 'Then why does it make me miserable?'"

"I could only relate to a dead image of the person I could love. The image of my dead grandfather would be the model of him at his most striking in my mind. It seems necessary for them to have been dead in order that I could express those feelings which were the feelings I held sacred for my grandfather ... it was a pseudo-sexual, infantile love which had not yet developed and matured. The sight of them [my victims] brought me a bitter sweetness and a temporary peace and fulfillment."

"Being a loner has its advantages, a self-containment necessary for keeping body and 'soul' alive and progressing. Dying in prison is not such a great problem as living in prison."

"Quite a few of us get pissed with liver crippling draughts of prison hooch, that last vestige of herbal medicine still available to cons."