And So We Live And Are Forever Leaving

 Child, I tell you now it was not
the animal blood I was hiding from,
it was the poet in her, the poet and
the terrible stories she could tell.

-Lucille Clifton from “Telling Our Stories“

Image: Oleksandr Hnatenko
Title: Rilke

An inevitable locomotive

We must admit there will be music despite everything.*

-Jack Gilbert, "A Brief for the Defense"

*"Poetry, for me," he declares in a 1965 essay, "is a witnessing to magnitude." In poems he sings of a "magnitude of pain, of being that much alive," and "a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace." +

Yes. And yes.

[R.I.P., Jack. 11.11.12]

Image: Etienne Martin, Le Manteau, 1962

Between the Cry and Silence

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G. K. Chesterton

Image: Salvador Dalí, The portrait of Federico García Lorca 
Title: From Octavio Paz, “André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning. Alternating Current” 

Today I feel the whole world is a door

What is art? Trying to find the door.

-Adam Fuss

Image: Hannah Höch, Portait of Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919
Title: Nod to Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theatre”

The astonished places you inhabited and left

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.

-Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures”


Image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980
Title: Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

The Flair of Great Loneliness There

+

The primordial tower

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 2



Image: Andrey Zakirzyanov,  The battle of celestial bodies, 1994

The Purpose of Poetry

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

-Czesław Miłosz

The ecstatic love of a young writer

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

—Charles Bukowski

Image: Dirk Nijland, Angler on the river Maas, Rotterdam

Title: Nod to Vladimir Nabokov

Symphonies without movements, operas without words

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind.

-George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

Image: The Musarithmetic Ark, attributed to Athanasius Kircher, 1650

Title thanks to: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Trembling Emblems

Life is it’s own rescue, for we — at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems
 

-Emily Dickinson

[Note: I've replaced Dickinson's love for life]

Image: Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970

Each poem is a resurrection

 Each poem is a resurrection, but one that engages us with a vulnerable body that may yet again slip into oblivion.

-Jacques Derrida

Photo: Carolin Gutt, Shock

What are those things?**

— What are those things
that shine in the sky,
— I asked my mother.

— Bees, she answered

Every night since then,
my eyes eat honey.

-Humberto Ak abal

**NOTE: April is National Poetry Month. Do yourself a favor and read a poem today. 


Image: Hollie Chastain, Fresh Courage

When the words become palpable

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker

Image: Adolf Wölfli, Rosalia Walther, Owner of the Grand-Hotel on Mount Neveranger, 1911

Title: Nod to John Ashbery

Would you die for spring?

You knock

without knowing that you knocked. The door

opens on a century of clouds and centuries

of centuries of clouds. The bird sings

among the toyons in the spring’s diligence

of rain. And then what? Hand on your heart.

Would you die for spring? What would you die for?

Anything?

-Robert Hass from "Berkeley Eclogue" 

Image: Alasdair Wallace, A flock of birds, 1999

What I Count On

what I count on
is a white birch
that stands
where no human language
is ever heard.


-Yosano Akiko, "What I Count On"

Photo: Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés

 

The Failure of Language

…you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue.

—Paul Guest, from Water

[image via Agence Eureka]

Rather Than Words

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

—Philip Larkin, “High Windows”

Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The arrival of the Queen of the Night, production for Mozart’s Magic Flute, 1815

A Little Space

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

-William Blake, Songs of Innocence

Photo: Lesley Dill, Flower Hands, 1997

Eternity and it is Just as Flat and Wide

I see the world is flat and the map flat
that records it, and both page and world
speak each other forever. Put a fold
in eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

-Dan Beachy-Quick from Spell 

[image: Johann Ruysch world map, 1507-1508]