"I’m thinking it’s time to go back to the peach farm or rather the peach farm seems to be wanting me back even though the work of picking, sorting, the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never been on a peach farm, just glimpsed from a car squat trees I assumed were peach and knew a couple in school who went off one summer, so they said, to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant ....."
"By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock With only the intent of watching Water flow beneath unwinding water. Facing up-stream, she held a flower To the sun as I leaned back and found An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there As if someone had left it by intent As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water Swirling upon stone and thus Transform the accident of meeting her— Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand— Into stark fact as obdurate as rock. Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead I just found here!" Would she have thought "An accident, that's credible, ....."
"In Book VIII of Milton's Paradise Lost, Raphael advises Adam: "be lowly wise. . . . Dream not of other worlds." Rabbi Finkelstein's prayer to God to give thanks for being allowed to die from the bottom up echoes such wisdom, just as Job's final quietude, 'comforted that I am dust,' is illustrative of lowly wisdom, an acceptance of the limits of our creaturehood. And so, too, does Hopkins return to his identification with the earth in his final phrase, 'Send my roots rain,' which carries essentially the same meaning as Yeats's recovery of 'radical innocence.' The absurdity of human pride is most fully on display when we conceive of ourselves as the center of creation, the culmination of an evolutionary process. To become aware of this fallacy opens up the possibility that we may be rescued from the illusion of dreaming of other worlds by laughter, by a comic sense of our minuscule place in the vastness of our universe in the fifteen billion years of its unfolding to who knows what end.
In Richard Wilbur's poem, 'A Voice from under the Table,' the speaker, having drunk himself into a state of 'holy' lucidity, discourses on the themes of longing and love in the tradition of Plato's Symposium. His diction is as high as his posture is low as he contemplates the mystery of the endlessness of human desire: 'The end of thirst exceeds experience. / A devil told me it was all the same / Whether to fail by spirit or by sense.' His pun on the word, 'spirit,' combining the high sense of human aspiration with an allusion to his inebriation, acknowledges the contradictory extremes of the human psyche: our proclivity to long for transcendence, to dream of immortality, and our creaturely finitude, our construction out of dust."
"The poem would address an unseen listener, an unseen audience. It does so through the rhetoric of address since the message in the bottle seems to be speaking to the poet alone, or to a muse, a friend, a lover, an abstraction, an object in nature. . . . It seems to be speaking to God or to no one. Rhetoric comes into play here, the radical of presentation, the rhythm of words creating a deep sensation in the reader. Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. It differentiates us; it unites us to the cosmos. "
Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.
"Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car; your office door closes behind you and at that moment you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall from the hall’s point of view. If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms of the buildings where you worked for seven years— if the halls don’t know you,
"I come, blood on blood, like the sea, wave on wave. I have a soul the colour of poppies. The luckless poppy is my destiny, from poppy to poppy I come to fall on the horns of my fate.
"Barn murals in Frostburg and Mount Savage will feature the work of two local poets -- one of them Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn.
Cumberland artist Bill Dunlap has already started painting the side of a barn at Carey Run Forge blacksmith studio near Frostburg and plans to begin work this summer on a barn at Cedar Rock Farm in Mount Savage."
"Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
"'Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters' by Allen Ginsberg, and the literary and historical notes for Sunday, June 3, 2012."
"It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg (books by this author), born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). When he was 17, his freshman year at Columbia University, Ginsberg was introduced to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac and Burroughs were older, no longer in school, experimenting with drugs, and trying to write. Ginsberg later said they encouraged him to think for himself and to worry less about conforming. When he was 28, he moved to San Francisco, where he was introduced to the poetry scene by Kenneth Rexroth, and he began working on a poem that would later be called 'Howl,' a poem in which the length of a line was based on how much he could say in one breath. Today it is one of the most recognized poems in literature and has sold nearly one million copies.
Ginsberg read a draft of 'Howl' at the now-famous Six Gallery, on an October night in 1955. Another poet who was there that night said the crowd left 'standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America ...' The next day, Ginsberg received a telegram from the Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Press, who'd attended the reading: 'Please send manuscript,' it said."
"Question: Where do you get the ideas for your poems?
Answer: Partly, of course, from my own experience -- like my father’s death when I was just sixteen or having lived both in New York City and in the countryside of Vermont whose landscape provided me with a multitude of images. And partly from my own imagination, the source of which I do not really comprehend, but for which I give thanks.
Question:What for you is the main relationship between the meaning of words and the sound of words?
Answer: For me a poem must always be a musical composition as well as a philosophical mediation or a portrait of a character or the description of a landscape or just the evocation of a mood. For me, if a poem is not musically expressive, it is not employing the full lyrical resources of language."
"The message in the bottle is a lyric poem and thus a special kind of communiqué. It speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. We are not in truth conversing by the side of the road. Rather, something has been written; something is being read. Language has become strange in this urgent and oddly self-conscious way of speaking across time. The poem has been (silently) en route—sometimes for centuries—and now it has signaled me precisely because I am willing to call upon and listen to it. Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other. The relationship between writer and reader is by definition removed and mediated through a text, a body of words. It is a particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other. The lyric poem is a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication between strangers—an immediate, intense, and unsettling form ofliterary discourse. Reading poetry is a way of connecting—through the medium of language—more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and interiority, privacy and participation. "
"Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.
"Aesthetic shifts over time can be seen as a kind of crop rotation; the topsoil of one field is allowed to rest, while another field is plowed and cultivated. In the seventies the American poetry of image covered the Midwestern plains like wheat; in the eighties, perhaps, it was the narrative-discursive sentence which blossomed and bore anthological fruit. This shifting of the ground of convention is one aspect of cultural self-renewal. But the fruitful style and idiom becomes conventional, and then conventionally tired.
In the last ten years American poetry has seen a surge in associative and “experimental” poetries, in a wild variety of forms and orientations. Some of this work has been influenced by theories of literary criticism and epistemology, some by the old Dionysian imperative to jazz things up. The energetic cadres of MFA grads have certainly contributed to this milieu, founding magazines, presses, and aesthetic clusters which encourage and influence each other’s experiments. Generally speaking, this time could be characterized as one of great invention and playfulness. Simultaneously, it is also a moment of great aesthetic self-consciousness and emotional removal."
"For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house after my mother’s death; she died the year before; she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute to weed the garden or to walk just a little way ....."
"I remember riding somewhere in a fast car with my brother and his friend Jack Brooks and we were listening to Layla & Other Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos. The night was dark, dark all along the highway. Jack Brooks was a pretty funny guy, and I was delighted ....."
"The catfish have the night, but I have patience and a bucket of chicken guts. I have canned corn and shad blood. And I've nothing better to do than listen to the water's riffled dark spill into the deep eddy where a '39 Ford coupe rests in the muck-bottom.
"It seems like there is no hobby or topic a person could be interested in that does not “have an app for that.” For poetry, I was shocked in regards to just how many iPhone apps are available and how many different things they can do. There are apps for writing poems, finding words that rhyme, reading other’s poems for inspiration, finding writing prompts and even watching videos of people performing their poetry live. If there is something you want your iPhone to do that is related to poetry, an app can handle it."
"..... I hope when the wild turkey Dreams at night it flies high up In gladness under vast islands Of mute starlight, its silhouette Vivid in the full moon, ....."
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