May 2013
30 posts
3 tags
“Wind blows the wheat down. He calls it prayer.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick, from “Lines” (with thanks to Love Is A Place)
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“I thought my problem was to face death with gaiety, now I have learned that it...”
– W. B. Yeats, from a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, November 20, 1937
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“Bind me—I still can sing—
Banish—my mandolin
Strikes true within—
Slay—and...”
– Emily Dickinson, “1005” (via)
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“Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
...”
– Mary Oliver, from “Mysteries, Yes” in Evidence
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“Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”
– Mary Oliver, from “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass” in Evidence
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“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out ev’n to...”
– Shakespeare, from “Sonnet 116”
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“Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every person has a ring of...”
– Shirley Ann Grau, The Keepers of the House
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“But time is short. I write.”
– Wisława Szymborska, from “Microcosmos”, transl. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak (with thanks to sketchofthepast)
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“The poem is what has neither name, nor rest, nor place, nor home: fissure moving...”
– Jacques Garelli, from “Excess of Poetry”, trans. Mary Ann Caws
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“The comforts
of language
are true
and deep;”
– Mary Oliver, from “If You Say It Right, It Helps the Heart to Bear It” in Evidence
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“Flowers open every night
across the sky, a breathing peace
and sudden flame...”
– Rumi, from The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
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“Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I...”
– Peter Everwine, “Rain”
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“Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in...”
– Mary Oliver, “Halleluiah” in Evidence
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“Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours....”
– Galway Kinnell, from “Wait”
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“Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,
Set free, fleeing from the soul...”
– Paul Verlaine, from “Ars Poetica”, trans. Norman R. Shapiro
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“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point,...”
– Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (with thanks to settledthingsstrange and habitofbeing)
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“I lie on the bed with my arms outstretched.
I am an anchor that has dug itself...”
– Tomas Tranströmer, from “Carillon” in The Great Enigma, trans. Robin Fulton (with thanks to A Poet Reflects)
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“It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness—
I’m so accustomed to my...”
– Emily Dickinson, from “[405]” (via)
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“The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh
As long as it lasts
Shuts out any...”
– André Breton, from “On the Road to San Romano”, in The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, trans. Mary Ann Caws
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“Poetry is made in a bed like love
Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things”
– André Breton, from “On the Road to San Romano”, in The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, trans. Mary Ann Caws
April 2013
44 posts
4 tags
“I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;”
– Countee Cullen, “To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time” (via)
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“Nature” is what we see —
The Hill — the Afternoon —
Squirrel — Eclipse -...”
– Emily Dickinson, “[668]”
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“One is always at home in one’s past…”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
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“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must...”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (with thanks to A Poet Reflects)
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“Yet we rise, hurl ourselves against the image
of this world, wanting to pierce...”
– Aleida Rodríquez, from “The Gravelly Path to the Woodpile” in Garden of Exile (with thanks to the wonderful A Poet Reflects)
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“Enough is so vast a sweetness I suppose it never occurs — only pathetic...”
– Emily Dickinson, from a letter to T. W. Higginson, 26 September 1870
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“We living nails hammered down in society!
One day we shall loosen from...”
– Tomas Tranströmer, from “Leaflet”, trans. Robin Fulton
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“My heart is broken, yet must understand.”
– W. B. Yeats, from “A Full Moon in March” (via @YeatsDaily)
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“(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And...”
– Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains”
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““Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it...”
– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
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“Throughout the dismal months my life sparkled alive only when I made
love with...”
– Tomas Tranströmer, “Fire-Jottings” in The Great Inigma, trans. Robin Fulton
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“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a...”
– Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet
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“What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And...”
– Marianne Moore, “What Are Years?”
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