Literary Verve

2012-03-08T14:31:00.000-06:00

"I have noticed some things about my poetry that I did not know before, in this process of correction; for instance, that it is almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to flight . . . that it is not the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity."

– W. B. Yeats, from a letter to Katherine Tynan, 1954

2012-03-07T20:00:00.003-06:00

Writing

I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
and does not return

– Octavio Paz (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

2012-03-07T19:45:00.001-06:00

"Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don't count where books are concerned –for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel, and why in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader, and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know, and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.

It's the only job I've ever wanted."

– Paul Auster, Prince of Asturias Awards, 2006

2012-03-07T18:56:00.002-06:00

Tom Hammick, Night Walk - Blue Hill, 2011, oil on linen

2012-03-06T23:55:00.000-06:00

"Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree."

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

2012-03-06T23:51:00.000-06:00

"The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains. Beautiful!
I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn'd the language of another world.

– Lord Byron, from "Manfred"

2012-03-06T20:15:00.001-06:00

Wild night – Wild nights!

Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the Winds -–
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass --
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden --
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight -–
In thee!

– Emily Dickinson

2012-03-05T16:42:00.000-06:00

"There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds."

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

2012-03-05T16:38:00.001-06:00

Photo by Andrey Omelyanchuck

2012-03-05T16:21:00.004-06:00

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

– W. B. Yeats

2012-03-03T16:12:00.000-06:00

The Blue Robe

How joyful to be together, alone
as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river
long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;
and now instead of two stories fumbling
to meet, we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness
of mortals, who know themselves:
how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,
old friend in the morning light,
beautiful in her blue robe!

– Wendell Berry

2012-03-03T15:50:00.002-06:00

"Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone."

– Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

2012-03-03T15:33:00.000-06:00

Photo by Daniel Escalé

2012-03-03T00:23:00.001-06:00

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson
 done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the
 themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

– Walt Whitman, "A Clear Midnight"

2012-03-02T14:02:00.000-06:00

"Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity . . ."

– Emily Brontë, from "When I Shall Sleep"

2012-03-02T13:53:00.000-06:00

"I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life's other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.

It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself. . . .
What do we know of it?"

– Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter dated 1923, found in A Year With Rilke (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

2012-03-02T13:40:00.000-06:00

"There floats out there
The shape that I shall take when I am dead,
My soul's first shape, a soft feathery shape . . .
I say it is about to sing."

– W. B. Yeats, The Death of Cuchulain

2012-03-02T13:36:00.000-06:00

Photo by Mark Houston

2012-03-01T15:27:00.000-06:00

"Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like? You don't see it in rooms if you are ill."

"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth," said Mary.

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

2012-03-01T15:08:00.000-06:00

"How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!"

– Colette, as cited in Simple Pleasures of the Garden by Susannah Seton

2012-03-01T14:56:00.000-06:00

"daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"

– William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

2012-03-01T14:16:00.002-06:00

Photo by Dmitrii Lezine

2012-02-29T13:53:00.000-06:00

"Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry."

– Robert Bly

2012-02-29T13:48:00.000-06:00

"Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley."

– Charles Simic, Dime-store alchemy: the art of Joseph Cornell

2012-02-29T13:41:00.000-06:00

"The poem, I’ve always felt, is an opportunity for me to create an integrated whole from so many broken shards."

– Rafael Campo, "Of Poetry and Medicine" via poets.org

2012-02-29T13:31:00.000-06:00

Photo by Daniel Escalé

2012-02-24T23:22:00.000-06:00

"Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes."

– Plato, Republic, Book II

2012-02-24T23:13:00.003-06:00

"Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that blows where it listeth; it must claim its right to pierce through every crevice of human nature, and to describe the relation of the soul and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that relation as it is, not as we would have it be;"

– W. B. Yeats, Explorations

2012-02-24T22:43:00.001-06:00

"Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography. This subjective urgency bears no relation to the quality of the book: lives have been changed by kitsch, too. What matters is that one’s pores be opened, and that the opening be true."

– Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic

2012-02-24T22:38:00.002-06:00

Photo by Kobiak

2012-02-23T14:38:00.000-06:00

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

– William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

2012-02-23T14:34:00.001-06:00

The Flash Reverses Time

DC Comics, November 1990, #44
“Never Look Back, Flash
Your Life Might Be Gaining On You”

When I’m running across the city

on the crowded streets

to home, when, in a blur,

the grass turns brown

beneath my feet, the asphalt

steams under every step

and the maple leaves sway

on the branches in my wake,

and the people look,

look in that bewildered way,

in my direction, I imagine

walking slowly into my past

among them at a pace

at which we can look one another in the eye

and begin to make changes in the future

from our memories of the past—

the bottom of a bottomless well,

you may think, but why not dream a little:

our past doesn’t contradict our future;

they’re swatches of the same fabric

stretching across our minds,

one image sewn into another,

like the relationship between a foot and a boot,

covariant in space and time—

one moves along with the other,

like an actor in a shadow play—

like a streak of scarlet light

across the skyline of your city

sweeping the debris, which is simply confetti,

candy wrappers, a can of soda,

all the experience of a day discarded

and now picked up

even down to the youthful screams of play

that put smiles on the faces of the adults

who hear remnants of their own voices

through a doorway leading back

to a sunrise they faintly remember.

– A. Van Jordan

2012-02-23T14:26:00.000-06:00

"I try not to live in the past, he thought, but who knows, sometimes the past lives in me."

– Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

2012-02-23T14:06:00.000-06:00

Photo by Simon Davis

2012-02-19T19:25:00.000-06:00

"When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us."

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence

2012-02-19T14:33:00.003-06:00

Small Wire

My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
So if you have only a thin wire,
God does not mind.
He will enter your hands
as easily as ten cents used to
bring forth a Coke.

– Anne Sexton

2012-02-19T14:15:00.000-06:00

Praise, my dear one.
Let us disappear into praising.
Nothing belongs to us.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

2012-02-19T13:58:00.002-06:00

Photo by Sergio Somavilla

2012-02-19T13:51:00.000-06:00

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."

–Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

2012-02-18T12:55:00.000-06:00

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

– Wu Men (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

2012-02-17T20:19:00.000-06:00

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

– Rumi

2012-02-17T20:08:00.000-06:00

"There is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, grasped, experienced and recognized in the tremulous after-ring of memory; no experience has been too slight, and the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another and held and borne up by a hundred others."

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (trans. M. D. Herter Norton)

2012-02-17T19:59:00.000-06:00

Photo by John Purchase

2012-02-14T20:51:00.001-06:00

The Kiss

She pressed her lips to mind.
 —a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

– Stephen Dunn

2012-02-14T13:52:00.000-06:00

Here I Love You

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

– Pablo Neruda (trans. W. S. Merwin)

2012-02-14T13:11:00.000-06:00

Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

2012-02-14T13:03:00.002-06:00

Photo by Matt Hart

2012-02-11T17:27:00.000-06:00

"Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below, as a reminder of how people like us suffer. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us."

– Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

2012-02-11T17:16:00.000-06:00

Winter seclusion:
once again I lean
against this post.

– Matsuo Basho (trans. R. H. Blyth)

2012-02-11T17:00:00.000-06:00

The snow threw a silent towel over everything.
One feels nothing but what goes on inside the house.
I wrap myself in a blanket and don't even think of
thinking.
Feeling creature comfort and dimly thinking,
I fall asleep with no less purpose than anything else going
on in the world.

– Fernando Pessoa (trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown)

2012-02-11T16:56:00.000-06:00

Photo by Steph Peesker

2012-02-11T10:49:00.000-06:00

"such was a poet and shall be and is

who'll solve the depths of horror to defend
a sunbeam's architecture with his life:
and carve immortal jungles of despair
to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand"

– E. E. Cummings, from "no man, if men are gods"

2012-02-11T10:34:00.000-06:00

"The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it."

– Sylvia Plath, from "Kindness"

2012-02-10T22:54:00.002-06:00

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

– Robert Frost

2012-02-10T22:45:00.001-06:00

I’ve cut open my veins: irrevocably,
Irreplaceably life is gushing.
Bring forth basins and bowls!
Any bowl will prove too small
Any basin – shallow.

Filling up and overly
Onto the earth, reeds purging.
Inconceivably, irrevocably,
Irreplaceably, verse is surging.

– Marina Tsvetaeva (trans. by Andrey Kneller)

2012-02-10T22:24:00.001-06:00

"One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read – in such a moment, anything can happen. The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed."

– Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

2012-02-10T22:17:00.000-06:00

Photo by Scott Hovind

2012-02-09T21:54:00.000-06:00

It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can't see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it's you, though –

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Anita Barrows and JoAnna Macy)

2012-02-09T20:55:00.000-06:00

"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful."

– Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

2012-02-09T20:18:00.002-06:00

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

– Rumi

2012-02-09T16:22:00.000-06:00

"Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day."

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

2012-02-08T15:44:00.000-06:00

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence."

– Léon Bloy

2012-02-08T15:36:00.002-06:00

Photo by Christopher Heald

2012-02-08T13:44:00.000-06:00

Poetry

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

– Pablo Neruda

2012-02-07T20:40:00.000-06:00

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."

– Muriel Rukeyser

2012-02-07T19:23:00.000-06:00

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."

– Virginia Woolf, The Waves

2012-02-07T16:51:00.000-06:00

Photo by Jonas Sjöblom

2012-02-07T16:49:00.000-06:00

"It is the very error of the moon:
She comes more nearer earth than she wont,
And makes men mad."

– William Shakespeare, Othello, Act V, Scene 2

2012-02-06T19:32:00.000-06:00

"The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains. Beautiful!
I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness
I learn'd the language of another world."

– Lord Byron, from "Manfred", Act III, Scene IV

2012-02-06T19:18:00.000-06:00

"Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."

– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

2012-02-06T15:50:00.000-06:00

"But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more
than it takes."

– John Ashbery, from "As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat"

2012-02-06T14:48:00.000-06:00

"Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.

Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more."

– Jeanette Winterson, from "Why I Adore the Night" (with thanks to Growing Orbits)

2012-02-06T14:43:00.002-06:00

Photo by Jp Dowling

2012-02-05T15:04:00.002-06:00

"And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us, grows deep and large, a lake."

– Jane Hirshfield, from "Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape" (with thanks to Proustitute)

2012-02-05T14:57:00.000-06:00

"Never forget: We are alive within mysteries."

– Wendell Berry, "Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition"

2012-02-04T21:36:00.001-06:00

"The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy center before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

– Wallace Stevens, from "It must be Abstract", from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

2012-02-04T16:54:00.001-06:00

We, the mortals, touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

– Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day: XV (trans. William O'Daly)

2012-02-04T16:38:00.000-06:00

Photo by Wayne Cardwell

2012-02-04T16:33:00.000-06:00

Winter solitude –
In a world of one color
the sound of wind.

– Matsuo Basho (trans. Robert Hass)

2012-02-04T16:18:00.000-06:00

Snow-Flakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (with thanks to Growing Orbits)

2012-02-04T16:15:00.000-06:00

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."

– Andrew Wyeth

2012-02-04T16:12:00.000-06:00

Photo by Scott Hovind

2012-02-02T12:52:00.000-06:00

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."

– Wislawa Szymborska, "The Poet and the World", Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1996

2012-02-01T23:49:00.000-06:00

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

– Wislawa Szymborska

2012-02-01T23:47:00.000-06:00

"Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

– Wislawa Szymborska, "The Poet and the World", trans. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh

2012-02-01T23:37:00.000-06:00

Photo by Kolya Chertoroev

2012-02-01T23:34:00.001-06:00

"It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city."

– Truman Capote, "Miriam", found in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote

2012-01-31T20:47:00.000-06:00

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

– Robert Graves

2012-01-30T15:30:00.000-06:00

"Life is not permanent. Like the leaves that fall from a tree, all things are impermanent, nothing endures; there is always change and death. Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against a sky, how beautiful it is? All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, there is a song. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away; and that is the way of life."

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things

2012-01-30T14:51:00.000-06:00

"The simplicity of winter has a deep moral. The return of nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread."

– John Burroughs, Winter Sunshine: The Writings of John Burroughs

2012-01-30T14:06:00.003-06:00

Photo by John Purchase

2012-01-29T16:17:00.000-06:00

"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."

– W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

2012-01-29T16:11:00.000-06:00

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Not for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

– Dylan Thomas

2012-01-29T15:59:00.000-06:00

"I too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny – that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

– Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

2012-01-29T15:31:00.000-06:00

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

– W. B. Yeats

2012-01-29T15:17:00.000-06:00

Photo by Aaron Miller

2012-01-29T14:55:00.000-06:00

"Praise to the mind
That moves toward meaning,
Kindness; mixes keenness
With routine of
Grace, has space,
And finds its place."

– Weldon Kees, from "Praise to the Mind"

2012-01-28T16:01:00.002-06:00

Haiku

Etched on the moth's wings
the story of a man's life
powder to the touch.

– Nicholas Christopher

2012-01-28T15:33:00.000-06:00

O Little Root of a Dream

O little root of a dream 
you hold me here 
undermined by blood, 
no longer visible to anyone, 
property of death.

Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth, 
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,

even 
here, 
where you 
refute me, 
to the letter.

Paul Celan

2012-01-28T15:21:00.000-06:00

"Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!"

– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet