July 2012
96 posts
7 tags
“Summer night –
even the stars
are whispering to each other.”
– Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass
3 tags
“Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us out to...”
– Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge (thank you, awritersruminations)
5 tags
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“How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.
How sweet is...”
– Charles Wright, from “The Southern Cross”
3 tags
“Dear lost sharer
of silences,
I would send a letter
the way the tree sends...”
– Linda Pastan, from “Eyes Only” (thank you, proustitute)
4 tags
7 tags
“No one reads the poetry of Yeats for its lucid logic; he despised rationalism....”
– Jamie James, “W. B. Yeats, Magus”
4 tags
“And a softness came from the starlight and filled me
full to the bone.”
– W. B. Yeats, from “The Wanderings of Oisin”
7 tags
“…a Princess Edene,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice...”
– W. B. Yeats, from “The Land of Heart’s Desire”
3 tags
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“The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The...”
– W. B. Yeats, from “The Indian to his Love”
6 tags
“And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences...”
– Yehuda Amichai, from “Quick and Bitter”, translated by Assia Gutmann (with thanks to awritersruminations)
5 tags
7 tags
“But all remembered beauty is no more
Than a vague prelude to the thought of you...”
– Sara Teasdale, from “Love Songs”
6 tags
“There is a quiet at the heart of love,
And I have pierced the pain and come to...”
– Sara Teasdale, from “Sappho”
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5 tags
“Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,
For my mind is proud and...”
– Sara Teasdale, from “What Do I Care”
3 tags
“but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight…”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Sonnet XLIII”
3 tags
3 tags
“Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far...”
– W. S. Merwin, “Utterance”
6 tags
“What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the...”
– W. S. Merwin, Los Angeles Times
3 tags
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“What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I’m...”
– Theodore Roethke, On Poetry and Craft
2 tags
“And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take...”
– Etty Hillesum, Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life
3 tags
5 tags
“In the great river of language that circles the universe,
Everything comes...”
– Charles Wright, from A Journal of the Year of the Ox
5 tags
“Looming and phosphorescent against the dark,
Words, always words.”
– Charles Wright, from “Cryopexy”
3 tags
3 tags
“Some lights are from stars, some from the sun
And moon, and other lights are...”
– Charles Wright, from “A Short History of the Shadow”
3 tags
“The other world is here, just under our fingertips.”
– Charles Wright, from “December Journal” in The World of the Ten Thousand Things
3 tags
“Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can...”
– William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation
3 tags
“Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review (via nthWord Magazine)
3 tags
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“The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the...”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Renascence”
5 tags
“Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Interim”
4 tags
4 tags
“I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a...”
– Hafiz, “Someone Should Start Laughing”, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
3 tags
“Let me peer out at the world
through your lens. (Maybe I’ll shudder,
or...”
– Nicole Guenther, from “Overlapping” in Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25
4 tags
3 tags
“Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader...”
– Billy Collins, The New York Times, 30 November 1997
5 tags
“If it was really Shelley who stood and listened to the skylark, it was not...”
– Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures
3 tags
3 tags
“Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet...”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Journey”
3 tags
“What should I be but just what I am?”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge”
4 tags
5 tags
“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long,...”
– Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness
4 tags
“Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their...”
– Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
3 tags
5 tags
“Every year, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, my girlfriend goes...”
– Jeanette Winterson, American Libraries Magazine 