“Good manners may be our best hope but we cannot fix the chaos.” – Thaddeus Golas.
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Vanishing Point
by Freya Manfred
The moment arrives when you say,
“I don’t dislike this man,
but how did I marry him?”
Something about his wintry voice,
the way he can’t or won’t show his face,
and how small and alone you feel
out here on earth’s curve,
driving day and night,
never reaching a destination,
until you realize you’re running parallel to him,
and you’ll never meet.
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A November Sunrise
by Anne Porter
Wild geese are flocking and calling in pure golden air,
Glory like that which painters long ago
Spread as a background for some little hermit
Beside his cave, giving his cloak away,
Or for some martyr stretching out
On her expected rack.
A few black cedars grow nearby
And there’s a donkey grazing.
Small craftsmen, steeped in anonymity like bees,
Gilded their wooden panels, leaving fame to chance,
Like the maker of this wing-flooded golden sky,
Who forgives all our ignorance
Both of his nature and of his very name,
Freely accepting our one heedless glance.
** I like her idea of God as an anonymous worker bee forgiving all our ignorance and “freely accepting our one heedless glance” **[curmudgeous].
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The Hero’s Luck
by Lawrence Raab
When something bad happens
we play it back in our minds,
looking for a place to step in
and change things. We should go outside
right now, you might have said. Or:
Let’s not drive anywhere today.
The sea rises, the mountain collapses.
A car swerves toward the crowd
you’ve just led your family into.
We all look for reasons. Luck
isn’t the word you want to hear.
What happened had to,
or it didn’t. Maybe
the exceptional man can change direction
in midair, thread the needle’s eye,
and come out whole. But even the hero
who stands up to chance has to feel
how far the world will bend
until it breaks him. He can see
that day: the unappeasable ocean,
the cascades of stone. A crowd
gathers around his body. He sees that too.
someone is saying: His luck just ran out.
It happens to us all.
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Margery Williams wrote in the classic children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
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William Butler Yeats said “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
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Signund Freud once said it was his job to help patients go from “neurotic misery to common human unhappiness”.
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Foreseeing by Sharon Bryan
Middle age refers more
to landscape than to time:
it’s as if you’d reached
the top of a hill
and could see all the way
to the end of your life,
so you know without a doubt
that it has an end -
not that it will have,
but that it does have,
if only in outline -
so for the first time
you can see your life whole,
beginning and end not far
from where you stand,
the horizon in the distance -
the view makes you weep,
but it also has the beauty
of symmetry, like the earth
seen from space: you can’t help
but admire it from afar,
especially now, while it’s simple
to re-enter whenever you choose,
lying down in your life,
waking up to it
just as you always have -
except that the details resonate
by virtue of being contained,
as your own words
coming back to you
define the landscape,
remind you that it won’t go on
like this forever.
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Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy by John Stone
In the chest
in the heart
was the vessel
was the pulse
was the art
was the love
was the clot
small and slow
and the scar
that could not know
the rest of you
was very nearly perfect.
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Poems: “A Drinking Song” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats.
A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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Poem: “Highway Five Love Poem” by Ruth L. Schwartz
Highway Five Love Poem
for Anna
This is a love poem for all the tomatoes spread out in the fields along Highway Five, their gleaming green and ruddy faces like a thousand moons prostrate in praise of sun.
And for every curd of cloud,
clotted cream of cloud spooned briskly
by an unseen hand into the great blue bowl, then out again, into a greedy mouth.
Cotton baled up beside the road,
altars to the patron saint of dryer lint.
Moist fudge of freshly-planted dirt.
Shaggy neglected savage grasses
bent into the wind’s designs.
Sheep scattered over the landscape like fuzzy confetti, or herded into stubbled funnels, moving like rough water toward its secret source.
Egrets praying in the fields like
white-cloaked priests.
A dozen wise and ponderous cows
suddenly spurred to run, to gallop, even, down a flank of hill.
Horses for sale, goats for sale, nopales for sale, orange groves for sale, topless trailers carrying horses, manes as loose and lovely as tomorrow in our mouths, and now a giant pig, jostling majestic in the open bed of a red pickup.
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Poem: “My Daughter’s Morning” by David Swanger
My Daughter’s Morning
My daughter’s morning streams
over me like a gang of butterflies
as I, sour-mouthed and not ready
for the accidents I expect
of my day, greet her early:
her sparkle is as the edge of new
ice on leafed pools, while I
am soggy, tepid; old toast.
Yet I am the first version
of later princes; for all my blear
and bluish jowl I am welcomed
as though the plastic bottle
I hold were a torch and
my robe not balding terry.
For her I bring the day; warm
milk, new diaper, escapades;
she lowers all bridges and
sings to me most beautifully
in her own language while
I fumble with safety pins.
I am not made young
by my daughter’s mornings;
I age relentlessly.
Yet I am made to marvel
at the durability of newness
and the beauty of my new one.
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Poem: “The Fabric of Life” by Kay Ryan
The Fabric of Life
It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps–
hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects.
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Poem: “On Faith” by Cecilia Woloch
On Faith
How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever longing for anything else–or: no, they must have longed; there must have been flickerings, stray desires, nights she turned from him, sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently, smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath and tangled limbs must have seemed not enough. But it was. Or they just held on. A gift, perhaps, I’ve tossed out, having been always too willing to fly to the next love, the next and the next, certain nothing was really mine, certain nothing would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all; faith that this latest love won’t end, or ends in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think of my mother lying awake in those arms that could crush her. That could have. Did not.
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Poem: “Execution” by Edward Hirsch
Execution
The last time I saw my high school football coach He had cancer stenciled into his face Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate Drawings on the chalkboard, small x’s and o’s That he copied down in a neat numerical hand Before practice in the morning. By day’s end The board was a spiderweb of options and counters, Blasts and sweeps, a constellation of players Shining under his favorite word, Execution, Underlined in the upper right-hand corner of things.
He believed in football like a new religion And had perfect unquestioning faith in the fundamentals Of blocking and tackling, the idea of warfare Without suffering or death, the concept of teammates Moving in harmony like the planets — and yet Our awkward adolescent bodies were always canceling The flawless beauty of Saturday afternoons in September, Falling away from the particular grace of autumn, The clear weather, the ideal game he imagined.
And so he drove us through punishing drills On weekday afternoons, and doubled our practice time, And challenged us to hammer him with forearms, And devised elaborate, last-second plays — a flea- Flicker, a triple reverse — to save us from defeat.
Almost always they worked. He despised losing And loved winning more than his own body, maybe even More than himself. But the last time I saw him He looked wobbly and stunned by illness, And I remembered the game in my senior year When we met a downstate team who loved hitting More than we did, who battered us all afternoon With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing And power, with deadly, impersonal authority, Machine-like fury, perfect execution.
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Poem: “The Pistachio Nut” by Robert Bly
The Pistachio Nut
God crouches at night over a single pistachio.
The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.
Haydn tells us that we’ve inherited a mansion On one of the Georgia sea islands. Then the last Note burns down the courthouse and all the records.
Everyone who presses down the strings with his own fingers Is on his way to Heaven; the pain in the fingertips Goes toward healing the crimes the hands have done.
Let’s give up the notion that great music is a way Of praising human beings. It’s good to agree that one drop Of ocean water holds all of Kierkegaard’s prayers.
When I hear the sitar give out the story of its life, I know it is telling me how to behave-while kissing The dear one’s feet, to weep over my wasted life.
Robert, this poem will soon be over; and you Are like a twig trembling on the lip of the falls.
Like a note of music, you are about to become nothing.
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Poem: “65″ by William Shakespeare
65
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o’ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
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John Keats said, “Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
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Claude Monet said, “I am following Nature without being able to grasp her. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
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Poem: “Beside the Point” by Stephen Cushman
Beside the Point
The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn’t say my work,
thank goodness.
The rock in the creek’s not so productive.
The mud on the bank’s not too pragmatic.
There’s nothing useful in the noise
the wind makes in the leaves.
Buck up now, my fellow superfluity,
and let’s both be of that worthless ilk, self-indulgent as shooting stars, self-absorbed as sunsets.
Who cares if we’re inconsequential?
At least we can revel, two good-for-nothings, in our irrelevance; at least come and make no difference with me.
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Poem: “Loss and Gain” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public domain.
Loss and Gain
When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained, What I have missed with what attained, Little room do I find for pride.
I am aware
How many days have been idly spent;
How like an arrow the good intent
Has fallen short or been turned aside.
But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
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Excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke “The Duino Elegies” – And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic / orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me / to his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming / presence. Because beauty’s nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, / and we adore it because of the serene scorn / it could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.
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Poem: “The Last Night That She Lived” by Emily Dickinson. Public Domain.
The Last Night That She Lived
The last night that she lived,
It was a common night,
Except the dying; this to us
Made nature different.
We noticed smallest things,–
Things overlooked before,
By this great light upon our minds
Italicized, as ’twere.
That other could exist
While she must finish quite,
A jealousy for her arose
So nearly infinite.
We waited while she passed;
It was a narrow time,
Too jostled were our souls to speak,
At length the notice came.
She mentioned, and forgot;
Then lightly as a reed
Bent to the water, shivered scarce,
Consented, and was dead.
And we, we placed the hair,
And drew the head erect;
And then an awful leisure was,
Our faith to regulate.
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Poem: “Dandelions” by Howard Nemerov
Dandelions
These golden heads, these common suns
Only less multitudinous
Than grass itself that gluts
The market of the world with green,
They shine as lovely as they’re mean,
Fine as the daughters of the poor
Who go proudly in spangles of brass;
Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.
Inside a week they will be seen
Stricken and old, ghosts in the field
To be picked up at the lightest breath,
With brazen tops all shrunken in
And swollen green gone withered white.
You’ll say it’s nature’s price for beauty That goes cheap; that being light Is justly what makes girls grow heavy; And that the wind, bearing their death, Whispers the second kingdom come.
– You’ll say, the fool of piety,
By resignations hanging on
Until, still justified, you drop.
But surely the thing is sorrowful,
At evening when the light goes out
Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters,
All down the field their ghostly hair,
Dry sinners waiting in the valley
For the last word and the next life
And the liberation from the lion’s mouth.
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Poem: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves–goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is–
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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Federico Fellini said “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
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Virginia Wolf wrote “We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying … what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound
darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.”
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Poem: “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins
The Lanyard
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly–
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim,
and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift–not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll: “If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things.”
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Anton Chekhov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
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Poem: “The Kiss” by Stephen Dunn
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.
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Poem: “Lament” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
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Poem: “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
As I Walked Out One Evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.
“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
“The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world.”
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.
“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.”
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
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Poem: “Ham and Cheese on Rye” by Gary Busha
Ham and Cheese on Rye
I am an old man sitting on a sagging dock, fishing in the rain, with not a fish in miles:
it is a perfect night for fishing.
Droplets run down my glasses, blurring my vision, but there’s nothing to see beyond the circle of light from the dock, anyway.
I know they’re out there, lurking in the weeds, hiding in shadows, waiting until hunger brings them out, forcing them to react without thinking, making them bite against their will.
Like them, I feel the gnaw of hunger working. Like them I try to hold off, stay put, keep from being like all the rest.
But time wins out, wears down the will,
and I reach inside my coat for a ham and cheese on rye.
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Poems: “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep ” by Robert Frost
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be–
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
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Robert Frost said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word.”
And, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
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Writer Nelson Algren said “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a guy named Doc, and never go to bed with anyone who has more troubles than you.”
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Sean O’Casey – Irish Playwright – once said “All the world’s a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
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Excerpt from “The Definition of Love” (Last two stanzas) by Andrew Marvell.
As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.
Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.
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Poem: “Man Writes Poem” by Jay Leeming, from Dynamite on a China Plate.(c) The Backwaters Press. Reprinted with permission.
Man Writes Poem
This just in a man has begun writing a poem in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now to our man Harry on the scene, what’s
the story down there Harry? “Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems to be doing fine, he’s using a blue pen, most poets these days use blue or black ink so blue
is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing in a breeze of some kind and what’s more his radiator is ‘whistling’ somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet, but I’m sure he’s rummaging around down there
in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something for us soon. Hang on–just breaking news here Chuck, there are ‘birds singing’ outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes … definitely
a confirmation on the singing birds.” Excuse me Harry but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality at this point wouldn’t you say? “Yes Chuck, you’re right, but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict
exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember being on the scene with Frost in ‘47, and with Stevens in ‘53, and if there’s one thing about poems these days it’s that
hang on, something’s happening here, he’s just compared the curtains
to his mother, and he’s described the radiator as ‘Roaring deep with the red walrus of History.’ Now that’s a key line, especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem, when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems
a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line, and who wouldn’t be? Looks like … yes, he’s put down his pen and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck.” Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That’s it for now,
but we’ll keep you informed of more details as they arise.
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Poem: “Words That Make My Stomach Plummet” by Mira McEwan, from Ecstatic. (c) Allbook Books, 2007. Reprinted with permission.
Words That Make My Stomach Plummet
Committee Meeting. Burden of Proof.
The Simple Truth. Trying To Be Nice.
Honestly. I Could Have Died. I Almost Cried.
It’s Only a Cold Sore.
It’s My Night. Trust Me. Dead Serious.
I Have Everything All Under Control.
I’m Famous For My Honesty.
I’m Simply Beside Myself. We’re On The Same Page.
Let’s Not Reinvent The Wheel.
For The Time Being. There Is That.
I’m Not Just Saying That.
I Just Couldn’t Help Myself. I Mean It.
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Poem: “Posthumous” by Jean Nordhaus
Posthumous
Would it surprise you to learn
that years beyond your longest winter
you still get letters from your bank, your old philanthropies, cold flakes drifting through the mail-slot with your name?
Though it’s been a long time since your face interrupted the light in my door-frame, and the last tremblings of your voice have drained from my telephone wire, from the lists of the likely, your name is not missing. It circles in the shadow-world of the machines, a wind-blown ghost. For generosity will be exalted, and good credit outlasts death. Caribbean cruises, recipes, low-interest loans. For you who asked so much of life, who lived acutely even in duress, the brimming world awaits your signature. Cancer and heart disease are still counting on you for a cure.
B’nai Brith numbers you among the blessed.
They miss you. They want you back.
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Gary Snyder – one of the Beat writers of the 1950s – said “True affluence is not needing anything.”
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Georges Braque said, “There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”
In Mexico the poor say that when there’s lightning the rich think that God is taking their picture.
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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.”
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Melancholy
by Baron Wormser
Weakness—the pale succumbing to loneliness,
Refusing to admit anyone else, indulging
The blue perquisites of adolescence
Long past their sensible deliquescence.
He knew it but went on drinking and regretting,
Not calling his friends and regretting,
Making scenes over nothing and regretting.
It helped to make him despise himself,
Which was, he sensed, what he wanted. He was
Then, in his oblique way, at ease to wander
The city’s brazen or quiet streets, conjuring
Random lives and how the slim arc
Of emotion was pulverized. Back home, he put
On some Monk, lay down, half-cried.
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William Strunk (author/grammarian “Elements of Style) wrote “It is worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.” Curmudgeous comment: I’m not sure. I think as long as you’re willing to recognize when you’re wrong and learn from it it might be worse to be irresolute.
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Herman Hesse, shortly before his death, wrote:
What you loved and what you strove for,
What you dreamed and what you lived through, Do you know if it was joy or suffering?
G sharp and A flat, E flat or D sharp,
Are they distinguishable to the ear?
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Ernest Hemingway had trouble writing since he’d participated in World War II. After the war was over he said, “[It's] as though you had heard so much loud music you couldn’t hear anything played delicately.”
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Dave Barry wrote “You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.”
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Franz Kafka wrote, “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
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William Henry Davies in the poem “Leisure”:
WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
and he once wrote: “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
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Finley Peter Dunne said, “Trust everybody, but cut the cards.”
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Thoreau said, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”
Henry David Thoreau said, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”
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Iris Murdoch said “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”
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From Hermann Melville’s “Moby Dick” – “Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.
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“Turtle” by Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she’s often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish. She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.
oh beautiful awful summer day,
what have you given, what taken away
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Novelist Richard Wright said, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
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Excerpt – last two lines from “Parting,” by Emily Dickinson.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
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Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” begins “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
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“poetry readings” by Charles Bukowski
poetry readings have to be some of the saddest damned things ever, the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies, week after week, month after month, year after year, getting old together, reading on to tiny gatherings, still hoping their genius will be discovered, making tapes together, discs together, sweating for applause they read basically to and for each other, they can’t find a New York publisher or one within miles, but they read on and on in the poetry holes of America, never daunted, never considering the possibility that their talent might be thin, almost invisible, they read on and on before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands, their wives, their friends, the other poets and the handful of idiots who have wandered in from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other, I am ashamed for their lisping egos, their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the rail, a bartender on last call, a waitress pouring me a coffee, a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway, a dog munching a dry bone, an elephant’s fart in a circus tent, a 6 p.m. freeway crush, the mailman telling a dirty joke anything anything but these.
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“…lost in the roadmaps of leaves which point in every direction at once” line from “Now” by Greg Watson
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Niels Bohr said, “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.”
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Truth by Leonard Nathan
As children in the schoolroom game
whisper from one end of the class to the other and garble the message they pass on or change it beyond recognition, so we pass on the truth of our kind.
My father heard it from his, something
vaguely involving God, and his father
heard it from his, and so on back
to Abraham, and so father
passed it on to me, but God had dropped out.
And so my son heard it, a wisdom
found inside a Chinese fortune cookie:
“Be good and hope,” which he will pass on to his son, but maybe with good missing or hope, maybe with love added.
Though love was never meant to mean so much
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The Cows at Night by Hayden Carruth
The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light
faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.
Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist
of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw
the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.
I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad
and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them-forty
near and far in the pasture,
turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad
because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.
But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how
in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then
very gently it began to rain.
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Oscar Wilde said “I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.” And he said, “The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.” And he also said, “I can resist anything but temptation.”
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Arthur Rimbaud said “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
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Dizzy Gillespie said, “I don’t care too much about music. What I like is sounds.”
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Dylan Thomas, born Oct 27 1914 “I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”
I am here because there is no refuge, finally, from myself. > On a poster in The Western New Mexico Correctional Facility.
>
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from “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” John Berryman
3
Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.
Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams; achieve in me patience till the thing be done, a careful view of my achievement come.
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.
Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.
Unite my various soul,
sole watchman of the wide & single stars.
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How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill–more of each
than you have–inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
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P.J. O’Rourke said, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
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Gabe Muoneke “..It’s no secret. It just takes discipline to do the right things over and over again.”
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The Story of My Life by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Each day goes down in history, wets its feet, bathes in the clear or murky stream, drinks deep, comes out to join past days on the other bank.
We go in with the bathing day, every morning, brace the shiver on our skin, taste the slaking of thirst, find footing on mossy rock. Climb out with sleep. Waking, we’re back on the first bank, wading with a new day into the kaleidoscopic water. Days far from either bank are barely seen and seem unseeing. There is no recording of them that knows the cold and quenching of their moment in the water. Yet I cannot let them go, nor bear the strong suggestion formed by their fading figures that they have let us go and that those coming cannot be foretold anything actual of water, flesh, or stone.
Publisher holds out a large envelope says, Sorry.
We can’t publish your autobiography.
Man sighs, says, Story of my life.
All these words, then, are only for the stream?
The stream is everything? The stream is not enough?
The specters on the banks are deaf but listening?
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Purgatory Is Nearer in November by Josephine Jacobsen
November is beautiful as the word sounds, is gray, is bare, Is compact of wind, of leaves blown and the thin, tall rain; Brought back to our care are the dead in November, and the air of these days is charged with their pain.
For these are not the free dead, not the remote, bright crowd Of our picture-book, or our image of nebulous heaven:
These are caught, tangled in a web comfortless as a shroud– These have not familiar place, nor flight, nor oblivion, even.
They have not escaped yet-they are close in the clouds massing together; At the cold first drop you will stare on the dark ground and remember.
They are the accent of autumn, they are the source of the tone of this weather.
The heart is reached by the waiting dead, in their month, in November.
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Rainer Maria Rilke said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”
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Mark Twain said “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company”.
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Robert Bly said “I think a poem is a dream, a dream which you are willing to share with the community. It happens a writer often doesn’t understand a poem until some months after he’s written it.”
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” includes this passage: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!”
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E.L. Doctorow said, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
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Poet William Stafford said, “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
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Poet Forrest Gander wrote, “I have lost the consolation of faith / though not the ambition to worship.”
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The Crocodile by Lewis Carroll
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
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Anton Chekhov said, “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
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Kurt Vonnegut “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
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Of The Terrible Doubt Of Appearances by Walt Whitman
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all, That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable
only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be
these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and
the real something has yet to be known, (How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me
and mock me!
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows,
aught of them,)
May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they
indeed but seem) as from my present point of view, and
might prove (as of course they would) nought of what
they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely changed
points of view;
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer’d by
my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while
holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and
reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am
silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of
identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
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‘Faith’ is a fine invention by Emily Dickinson
“Faith” is a fine invention…
“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentleman can see–
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
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I like a look of Agony… by Emily Dickinson
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true–
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe–
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The Eyes glaze once–and that is Death– Impossible to feign The Beads upon the Forehead By homely Anguish strung.
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Tossing and Turning by John Updike
The spirit has infinite facets, but the body confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting in-betweens, northeasts and northwests, that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets, tilted toward that unreachable star hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross
your ankles. Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go to sleep less to rest than to participate in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.
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David Foster Wallace said “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
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Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends — / It gives a lovely light!”
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Excert from The Cross of Snow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that reverberated.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
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Bees by Jane Hirshfield
In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.
Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.
But the faint cries–ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?
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Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr said “…We aim at the infinite, and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames. … You have given me the companionship of dear friends who have helped to keep alive the fire in my heart. If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after, I should be ready to say goodbye.”
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Trains by David Shumate
I am seduced by trains. When one moans in the night like some dragon gone lame, I rise and put on my grandfather’s suit. I pack a small bag, step out onto the porch, and wait in the darkness. I rest my broad-brimmed hat on my knee. To a passerby I’m a curious sight–a solitary man sitting in the night. There’s something unsettling about a traveler who doesn’t know where he’s headed.
You can’t predict his next move. In a week you may receive a postcard from Haiti. Madagascar. You might turn on your answering machine and hear his voice amid the tumult of a Bangkok avenue. All afternoon you feel the weight of the things you’ve never done. Don’t think about it too much. Everything starts to sound like a train.
** I am particularly delighted by that last thought. “Don’t think about it too much. Everything starts to sound like a trail.” I think almost everything does to me now.
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Adam’s Curse by William Butler Yeats
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.’
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There’s many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know– Although they do not talk of it at school– That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books; Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
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Photographer Diane Arbus said “I work from awkwardness. By that I mean if I stand in front of something instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”
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Bridal Shower by George Bilgere
Perhaps, in a distant cafe,
four or five people are talking
with the four or five people
who are chatting on their cell phones this morning in my favorite cafe.
And perhaps someone there,
someone like me, is watching them as they frown, or smile, or shrug at their invisible friends or lovers, jabbing the air for emphasis.
And, like me, he misses the old days,
when talking to yourself
meant you were crazy,
back when being crazy was a big deal,
not just an acronym
or something you could take a pill for.
I liked it
when people who were talking to themselves might actually have been talking to God or an angel.
You respected people like that.
You didn’t want to kill them,
as I want to kill the woman at the next table with the little blue light on her ear who has been telling the emptiness in front of her about her daughter’s bridal shower in astonishing detail for the past thirty minutes.
O person like me,
phoneless in your distant café,
I wish we could meet to discuss this,
and perhaps you would help me
murder this woman on her cell phone,
after which we could have a cup of coffee, maybe a bagel, and talk to each other, face to face.
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In 1917 that the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record, for the Victor Talking Machine Company. They were five white boys, led by Nick La Rocca. They came out of New Orleans, moved to Chicago and then New York. Their slogan was “Untuneful Harmonists Playing Peppery Melodies.” The first record had two sides: “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step.” They were the first to record commercial jazz, and they made it popular with songs like “Tiger Rag.” In late 1917, they changed the name “Jass” to “Jazz.” — (not poetry, or quotation, but damn poetic history)
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April 5, 1974 by Richard Wilbur
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
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Poet Robert Hass, (books of poetry include Praise (1979), Human Wishes (1989), and Time and Materials (2007).) said, “Take the time to write. You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.”
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“Governments should practice the same principle as doctors: first, do no harm.” Barak Obama – Apr 14 2009
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Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, said “Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” and, “No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”
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14th chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren, said ” “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.”
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The Loon by James Tate
A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up in another world. I had no idea what was expected of me.
I waited for instructions. Someone called and asked me if I wanted a free trip to Florida. I said, “Sure. Can I go today?” A man in a uniform picked me up in a limousine, and the next thing I know I’m being chased by an alligator across a parking lot. A crowd gathers and cheers me on.
Of course, none of this really happened. I’m still sleeping.
I don’t want to go to work. I want to know what the loon is saying. It sounds like ecstasy tinged with unfathomable terror. One thing is certain: at least they are not speaking of tax shelters. The phone rings. It’s my boss. She says, “Where are you?” I say, “I don’t know. I don’t recognize my surroundings. I think I’ve been kidnapped. If they make demands of you, don’t give in. That’s my professional advice.”
Just then, the loon let out a tremendous looping, soaring, swirling, quadruple whoop. “My god, are you alright?” my boss said. “In case we do not meet again, I want you to know that I’ve always loved you, Agnes,” I said. “What?” she said.
“What are you saying?” “Good-bye, my darling. Try to remember me as your ever loyal servant,” I said. “Did you say you loved me?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and hung up. I tried to go back to sleep, but the idea of being kidnapped had me quite worked up. I looked in the mirror for signs of torture.
Every time the loon cried, I screamed and contorted my face in agony. They were going to cut off my head and place it on a stake. I overheard them talking. They seemed like very reasonable men, even, one might say, likeable.
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Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani said:
Light is more important than the lantern, The poem more important than the notebook, And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
They are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty
And my madness.
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