## Metadata - Author: [[Mark Doty]] - Full Title: The Art of Description - Category: #books ## Highlights - All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative, an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=79)) - Is it necessary to render this bit of perception into words? Why do I feel compelled to get this right? To try to explain this feels a little like peering down my own throat in the mirror, trying to see inside myself. Hopeless. It’s what I do, the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood: finding the words. ([Location 100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=100)) - To find accurate words, or, more ambitiously, terms commensurate with the clamoring world. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=107)) - What we want when we describe is surely complex: To solve the problem of speechlessness, which is a state without agency, so that we feel impressed upon by things but unable to push back at them? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To be accurate (but to what? the look of things, the feel of being here? to the strange fact of being in the face of death?)? To arrive at exactitude in order to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world, in order to give those words to someone else, or even just to savor them for ourselves? ([Location 126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=126)) - The need to translate experience into something resembling adequate language is the writer’s blessing or the writer’s disease, depending on your point of view. ([Location 140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=140)) - The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing. ([Location 143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=143)) - Bishop is concerned with the experience of observing; her aim is to track the pathways of scrutiny. Elsewhere, she praises “baroque sermons (Donne’s, for instance)” that “attempted to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose.” ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=213)) - Every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world. Bishop’s work of seeing offers, ultimately, a precise portrayal of the one who’s doing the looking. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=260)) - we’re brought into intimate proximity to the slipstream of her sensations. Subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, known through our associations and histories, our scaffoldings of concerns and interests, the tones and shadings of our moods. ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=264)) - The time of interiority pools, constricts, tumbles, and speeds. We live in a felt narrative progression, through which experience is transformed into memory. And memory edits its records of the past like a brilliant auteur—cutting, juxtaposing, creating a pace determined by the direction and emotion of a story. What is memory but a story about how we have lived? ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=271)) - lyric is concerned neither with the impingement of the past nor with anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=277)) - “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=285)) - Bishop tells us this event was in the past, then writes with such immediacy and vivacity as to deny us any sense of distance, and all the poem’s speeding up and slowing down suggests she’s out to play with time. In this light, her ending’s a small stroke of genius. We read the final line as past tense consistent with the body of the poem: I let the fish go yesterday, or last week, or years ago. But since let is also the present-tense form of the verb, the line also has the immediacy of something happening now, as if the poem’s final gesture of release is still taking place. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=340)) - “The fish,” Nicholson Baker says of this poem in his novel The Anthologist, “doesn’t want to be described.” Baker’s reading of the poem—or should I say his character’s take on it?—is dazzling: those lines hanging from the fish’s jaw are lines of poetry, “all the many other attempts to rhyme this old fish into poetry.” The fish must be released, he suggests, because “you have to return reality to itself after you’ve struggled to make a poem out of it…. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long.” ([Location 363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=363)) - It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and to speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=371)) - It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00PF6BONQ&location=390))