Aphorisms by Eric Nelson
Posted on April 27, 2009
Filed Under Aphorisms | 7 Comments
Olivia Dresher alerts me to yet another wonderful aphorist from the pages of her excellent FragLit journal. Eric Nelson is a poet and professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing. His publications include The Interpretation of Waking Life (University of Arkansas Press, 1991) and Terrestrials (Texas Review Press, 2004). I’m not sure whether to describe Nelson’s work as aphoristic poems or poetic aphorisms. He writes in verse form, in any case; i.e. short lines arranged on the page as a poem, with the first letter of each new line capitalized. But many of the poems are not more than a sentence in length. They sketch haiku-like scenes in the mind—of melting snowmen, a butterfly resting on a turd—but also mix an aphoristic bluntness with a more traditionally ‘poetic’ poignancy. The selection in FragLit is called “The Devil’s Almanac”; an allusion to the decidedly unpoetic Ambrose Bierce, perhaps? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you call the sayings, of course. The important thing is to read them. You can do that below, and you can read more of Nelson’s aphorisms/poems here.
Only someone who still has it
Can say
Hope is a curse.
Happy memories
Are the saddest.
It’s not the going home
That’s hard.
It’s the wanting to.
It’s solitude if you like it.
Loneliness if you don’t.
Why oppose opposites?
A hammer pulls as well as drives.
Only what is buried grows.
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7 Responses to “Aphorisms by Eric Nelson”
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“Surreal”: a word into which people have come to pack a bewildering variety of responses.
To give up hope is to keep on hoping.
Opposition completes a thought.
We’re all drowning, but don’t say it out loud.
Wonderful!
A dream separates, but a look unites.
Don’t fill in the blanks; they’re supposed to be there.
Spend yourself; there’s plenty more.
Just noticed you posted me a message. Thanks for the acknowledgment. Enjoyed so many of yours it’s hard to know where to begin. Please let me know where to find them when more are available.
This sort of “poetic” viewpoint on aphorisms is fine; but having these introverted “literary snippets” pop into your head all the time is often an irritating annoyance – especially when you haven’t anything better to do. Have you ever had an itch you cannot scratch? Aphorisms, I think, can be something like that, if you haven’t a poetic way of thinking about you that steers them in the right direction, or you might have a problem there… As John Morely the English essayist once said, “Beware of cultivating this delicate art,” – or you might drop a clanger by surprise.
[...] Nelson, whom you may recall from this 2009 post, is back with some more of his haiku-like aphorisms. Some of these sayings have unmistakeable Zen [...]