Ron Silliman quotes

What's happening is the language. Not only in the usual sense of being interesting (which it is), but in the new sense that words are events, as real and important in themselves as wars and lovers... It is to the word, then, that the mind moves, and the word responds by taking on a physicality, even a sensuality, we have all been trained to ignore. Words have weight, and the distance between two can be a chasm filled with forces of association... What Clark is doing is genuinely new.
-- Ron Silliman

#Distance #Real #War

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.
-- Ron Silliman

#Art #Poetry #Narrative

Here, for a moment, we are joined.
-- Ron Silliman

#Moments

BEFORE THERE WAS BILLY COLLINS & TED KOOSER, THERE WAS EDGAR GUEST
-- Ron Silliman

#Guests

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. This, over the years, can cause real cardiovascular damage.

Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

Of course, the advantage is that, being in this business, you get to learn a lot, experience a lot of new things, and you can become real successful. The disadvantage is, of course the negative media. People may try to manipulate you and control you, and those are the things you have to avoid. But if you maintain strong family values and you believe in God, you can be successful. So, it's been tough, but I've gotten through it because I stuck with my family and my deep belief in God.

A visual understanding of great composition and how to use a camera and expensive lenses can be learned, but drive and a real hunger for making photos and telling stories... I don't think that part can be learned. You either have that inside, or you don't.

All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.