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

The Radical of Writing

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”
―Eudora Welty

Image: Yto Barrada, Family Tree, 2009

The Physicality of Writing

I discovered the tongue and the lips of my heart. Since then I have not had a mouth.

—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Photo:  Edward S. Curtis

Getting Lost(er)

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in… in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2005




Image: Paul Harbutt, At world’s End II, 2007

Some is Poetry Which I am not Sure I Understand Yet

“…I longed to know the world’s name.” —Robert Penn Warren, from “American Portrait: Old Style”

Image:  Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia

A Place

“Each moment is a place you've never been.”
―Mark Strand, New Selected Poems 

Photo: found

The Not Said

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…Oppen found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun. His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering.

-Michael Davidson on George Oppen

Image: Lava Flow Engulfing a Village to the West of Vesuvius, 1944

You come back home to find yourself there

"And the day goes by, but time stands still."
— Knut Hamsun, Pan

Image: Cypraea tigris Linnaeus, 1758

Title: Attributed to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Unmapped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You do not have to leave to arrive.
— Andrea Gibson

[image: August Natterer]

The Blind Astronomer

 

His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
—Elias Canetti

[Image: Found]

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

 

Valéry on Dictionaries and Ghosts

It’s most instructive when you can’t find the right word — it can prove that you’re truly envisaging a mental fact, and not a ghost from a dictionary.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks (1900)


Image: