For Luc Sante "Elegance and precision are necessary allies; together they indicate the presence of truth":
The French language opened poetry to me, and I wrote as well as read it throughout my teens, albeit in English since I did not trust my command of the nuances of French. Eventually I came to love English-language poetry as well, but never quite in the same way. Had I been stopped on the street and ordered to recite a line of poetry, I would automatically have said: J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaînes d'or d'étoile à étoile, et je danse ("I stretched ropes from spire to spire, garlands from window to window, gold chains from star to star, and I dance"—Rimbaud).Midway through college, I stopped writing poetry altogether. I doubted my talent, but I also had found what I thought was the authentic music of the American language, in the prose of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon," the opening sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice, seemed to exemplify in nine words all the highest virtues of American prose. It was plain, unadorned demotic speech, resolutely laconic and flat, containing a whole landscape of gas stations and bus depots and bars, of dollar bills and cigarette butts and spit, stuff I had encountered in daily life that seemed to stare down literature and dare it to cross the line in the dirt. It defied all the verities and aesthetics of the university in which I was a half-reluctant conscript, of course, but no less significant was the fact that it embodied the inverse of everything I thought I knew about French.
[Via the Three Penny Review
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