Big Thoughts, Human-sized Canvas
I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of the poetry is the way in. My poems often begin with a rhythm but without the words. A few words may come to you, and they may be …
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to…
“Every morning when you get up, write an epitaph!” I watched them scribble something. “That’s good, I encouraged them, “start right away!,” though I knew that what they were scribbling were not epitaphs, but “every morning when you get up write an epi… epipi… epi…”
…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into…
I hear I am one of the most successful living poets in the world these days. And if someone asked me, “How in the hell did that ever happen?” I could respond, “Well, I worked my butt off, and I have been lucky at poker, and…”
I’m trying something new! You’re invited to post your own poetry or bits of stories, drop links to favorite literature-related sites, tell us about a recent writing-related experience or some other creative writing goodness. Have a poem in a poetry journal? Drop a link. Have a friend who does gorgeous work? Tell us about it. [...]
Here I am at three in the morning, three hours after Earth Day, unable to sleep, unwilling to let the sun come up without having excerpted Rachel Carson.
Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962). In 1958 a friend wrote to her for…
(e)
Of Da Capo: “Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
(f)
“Art like life is an open secret.”
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be…
Last year’s miracles will soon be
forgotten. New creatures whirl in
from nonexistence, galaxies scattered
around their feet. Have you met them?
“…I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”
“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist…
