imaginary

Richard Wilbur on the difference between imagination & fantasy

art, language & literature, on writing / By /

From Helen McCloy Ellison, Ellesa Clay High, & Peter A. Stitt’s interview of Richard Wilbur in “The Art of Poetry No. 22” (The Paris Review: Winter 1977, No. 72):

To me, the imagination is a faculty that fuses things, takes hold of the physical and ideal worlds and makes them one, provisionally. Fantasy, in my mind, is a poetic or artistic activity that leaves something out—it ignores the concrete and the actual in order to create a purely abstract, unreal realm.

TV signals passing through the Stone Age air

commonplace book, technology / By /

From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):

The gift-dropping missions had ended in 1996. There was still no television set on North Sentinel; it remained, like Prospero’s island, a place where the air shimmered with invisible signals, with unseen Hindi soap operas and Thai music that drifted, unheard, across the Andaman Sea.