July 2012
96 posts
6 tags
“I’ll tell you what I can of darkness,
and its song will light the rest of the...”
– Nathaniel Perry, from “Thunder Moon” (via Poetry Verve)
3 tags
“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to...”
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (with thanks to sunrec)
4 tags
4 tags
“…what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to bed without making...”
– Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon
4 tags
“For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It...”
– Julia Alvarez (with thanks to A Poet Reflects)
2 tags
5 tags
“Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay
harvest tomorrow, a holiday in...”
– Wendell Berry, “Independence Day”
5 tags
“Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown,...”
– Walt Whitman, “America”
5 tags
6 tags
“I feel now, as never before, that
a poem is the condensed power of all human...”
– Edvard Kocbek, from Nothing Is Lost: Selected Poems, trans. Michael Scammell and Veno Taufer
6 tags
“As a writer I am completely independent, no force on earth can tell me what to...”
– Edvard Kocbek, “On Poetry, Freedom and Necessity”, trans. Michael Scammell and Veno Taufer
2 tags
6 tags
“I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.”
– Anna Kamienska, from “A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook”, translated by Clare Cavanagh
4 tags
“…now and again something utterly ridiculous occurs which makes us laugh,...”
– Evelyn Scott, Escapade
3 tags
3 tags
“In a country without saints or shrines
I knew one who made his pilgrimage
to...”
– Wendell Berry, “The Springs”
6 tags
“The shy speechless sound
of a fruit falling from its tree,
and around it the...”
– Osip Mandelstam, from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin
5 tags
June 2012
150 posts
3 tags
“Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness...”
– Osip Mandelstam, from “Octaves”, translated from the Russian by Ian Probstein
3 tags
“The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake...”
– Osip Mandelstam, from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown 