He said: "I asked William Stafford 'how can you write a poem every morning?' and Bill said, 'Just lower your standards.'"
Then he said: "Start with anything—whatever happens, and write one every day." (via my typography: the shape of daily life)
"Poetry is just the evidence of life.
If your life is burning well,
poetry is just the ash."- Leonard Cohen
"Poetry is not always words."
- Audrey Foris
"The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for, listening to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value. Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some and not tasting others." - R. H. Blyth (via Whiskey River, one of my favorite blogs)
Sleep on horseback,
The far moon in a continuing dream,
Steam of roasting tea. - Basho
"In truth we talk only to ourselves,
but sometimes we talk loud enough
that others may hear us.
The voice of life in me cannot reach the ear of
life in you;
but let us talk that we may not feel lonely.
All our
words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind."
- Kahlil Gibran
Sometimes while I am chanting
the Hebrew words become liquid
as warm rain and I slip through
them as if they were water parting
to let me down in a clear place.
Sometimes when I am praying
the words stop and the darkness
rises like water in a basin
and I come into silence
rich as the heart of a rose.
Sometimes when I meditate
light swells along my limbs
and opens sweet as apple
blossoms from the hard wood
of my knobbly spine.
Light slides behind my eyes
light rises in my throat
light pulses in my chest.
There is no I only you only
light burning and unburnt.
- poetess Marge Piercy
credit some poetry quotes from Nondual Highlights, January 29, 2007 edition (more there)
images Art Nouveau painter Georges de Fleure's La voix du diable or The Voice of the Devil (hey, she's looks harmless imagining and writing), Number forty-one, 2005, "a painting from Anthony Ulinski from Teaism, a teahouse just around the corner from the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC."; a page from Octavien de Saint-Gelais' translation of Ovid's Epistulae heroidim, 1496-1498 (via)
Poetry is in the air...
From Jeanette Winterson, "We Need Poetry:
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=445
"Poetry, because it has rhythm and because it is made out of breath, is easy to remember. It fits under the tongue like a slowly dissolving pill, but there are no side-effects – well maybe there is one; the next time you open your mouth to speak, something of the poem stays with you, and laces your response. In that way, poetry makes poets out of all of us, enlivening our personal capacity to speak with feeling and with an honesty that comes of being able to find the right words."
Posted by: Nadine | Feb 05, 2007 at 02:34 PM