Are you possessed by topophilia?

C. D. Wright’s: The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, is a collection of fragments. It is also a book on writing and reading, a book on how reading informs writing, and on the relationship between writers & artists – across time & culture.

In The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures … Wright is giving word to many of her friends and mentors; here is William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Jean Valentine. Here is the painter Agnes Martin and the sculptor Anne Truitt, a short snatch from Beckett, some words by Woolf, and many, many more.

Right at the end of the The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures … there is a text called “Questionnaire in January”, here are some snippets:

Colette said writing leads only to writing. Where does it lead you. And what led you here.

Agnes Martin White Flower (1960) Oil on canvas

 

Agnes Martin said, of painting White Flower, she was trying to express the emotions we feel when we see grey geese descending.

Can you put words to an inchoate desire?

If your goal was to forget yourself in your writing, what would you foreground in your stead.

James Hillman said, Get out of history, get into geography. What do you say.

Bernd and Hilla Becher: Industrial Landscapes 

Are you possessed by topophilia.

What is your favorite body of water and why.

Linda Norton wrote that she “walked into poetry / in search of a place to rest, / a place to suffer formally”; Jack Gilbert remarked that poetry helps you to suffer more efficiently. Some comfort can be found in that.

Does poetry protect anything from anyone or any one from any thing.