EPIGRAPHS

Epigraphs have always fascinated me. A writer nods to another writer, acknowledging lineage. A writer tries to give the flavor or essence — or perhaps the source — of a piece of writing. Or maybe she just can't resist sharing a great quote. Here are epigraphs I've used for books, poems, etc.

EPIGRAPHS TO BOOKS:

To The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh:
​
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
—Leonard Cohen, "Halleluja"
​
Beneath the story of cause and consequence
Another story is pointing another way.
—Carl Dennis, "Not the End"


To End into Opening: six sestinas and their humble companion poems:

It never ends, this dire need to know,
This need to see a diagram unfold
In silent angles, drawing in the sand,
This need to see a diagram achieve
Self-organizing equilibrium
Among the mica flakes and granite-crumbs,
This need to fill the universe with sand,
And all in play, with everything in play…
—Gjertrud Schnackenberg

To Return to a Meadow:

Nothing could stifle my inner certainty that a shining point exists where all lines intersect.
—Czeslaw Milosz

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow   
as if it were a given property of the mind   
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,   
everlasting omen of what is.
—Robert Duncan

To All the Difference: poems of unconventional motherhood:

How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly?
—Gilles Deleuze

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Epigraph to the Preface of All the Difference: poems of unconventional motherhood:

"The nearest, inmost things are the most arduous to seize."
 —Richard Sieburth, writing on Friedrich Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments

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EPIGRAPHS TO POEMS IN ECHOES AND LINKS: 

To "Assignment: Ekphrasis" 

Full fathom five thy father lies; 
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
—Ariel, Shakespeare's The Tempest

To "Theater of Cruelty"

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
—T. S. Eliot

To "Ginny"

If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
deeply with Things--:  how easily he would come
to a different day, out of the mutual depth.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

To "Recognition: Work of the Lovers" 

And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.
—William Butler Yeats

To "On Curved Earth"

Clarity

in the sense of
transparence

I don't mean that much can be explained.

Clarity in the sense of silence.
—George Oppen

To "In the Late Afternoon, September"

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.
—Rae Armantrout

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

To "Just Home in Bed"

The people who sleep with their socks on, 
day is over to them, adoring and abandoned.
—Arielle Greenberg

To "Dark Myth Left Empty"

Here was, prepared against his death, the dark myth he left empty.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

To "Dry"

Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone.
 —Baruch Spinoza

To "Grinding the Lens"

Each creature must 
himself, you were sure, grind the lens
through which he perceives the world.
—Frank Bidart 

To "Out of the Violin"

"What seems so far from you is most your own."
—Rainer Maria Rilke

To "For All My Cherished Suicides"

I forgive you everything and there is nothing to forgive.
—Gertrude Stein

To "Time and Again"

We come too late for the gods and too early for Being.
—Martin Heidegger

To "Blades Cutting Upward through Density toward Sky"

"What we like determines what we are..." 
—John Ruskin

To "The Work"

...this werk asketh a ful greet restfulnes...
—Cloud of Unknowing

To "Meditation Opposing Flight"

The point of the nail is applied to the very center of the soul 
and its head is the whole of necessity 
throughout all space and time.
—Simone Weil

at the nail's point the hammer-blow
undiminished
—George Oppen