Singing on Carroll Street

An 18x24 oil of Carroll Street at the bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

Related to the previous quote from Charles Wright is the following from Helen Vendler's book on Seamus Heany, where she comments on his book Seeing Things:

"The powerful effort of re-imagining everything - not representing it mimetically as it happened; not representing it embalmed by memory; but representing it on an abstract and symbolic plane that presents itself as such - this is the strenuousness that underlies the hieroglyphs of Seeing Things.  The virtue of such writing is that it records what is precious without tethering it to a limited personal place and a brief human lifetime.  The poet sacrifices himself - as autobiographical persona, as narrator of his own era, as a person representing his class or ethnic group - in order to see things in the most basic terms of all..."

Elsewhere, Heany wrote, "The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are and might be."

All I can do is keep all this in mind:  I have no idea if I am succeeding.