March 2013
8 posts
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The Art of Poetry No. 94, Kay Ryan
INTERVIEWER: How do you know a poem is successful?
RYAN: I guess when I’m not embarrassed.
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The Art of Poetry No. 94, Kay Ryan
INTERVIEWER: Has it been important for you to live an ordinary life?
RYAN: I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind.
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The Art of Poetry No. 94, Kay Ryan
INTERVIEWER: You and Carol have been married twice because of the changes in California’s marriage laws. Was it important for you two to be able to marry?
RYAN: It meant a lot in terms of human rights, especially to Carol. We’ve been together since 1979. When I first met Carol, I was so glad to find somebody I could really talk to. There were people who I could drop a stone down and hear it go plunk really fast. But I could drop a stone down Carol and never hear it hit the bottom.
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“I’m rather shocked to look back at the way I thought of the prisoners at that...”
– Kay Ryan on teaching at San Quentin Prison, The Art of Poetry No. 94
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“His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and...”
– A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
~*In memory of one of my favorite Irishmen who endowed his youthful characters with such inspiring curiosity and wisdom.*~
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“What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s...”
– Kay Ryan, Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 94
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“I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little...”
– Kay Ryan on how she developed a habit of writing
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“…In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We, and...”
– Walter Kaufmann’s Prologue to Martin Buber’s I and Thou
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“Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/when you’re old enough to...”
– Willie Nelson, “Tell Me Why”
February 2013
18 posts
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“I am my mother, but I’m not.
I am my grandmother, but I’m not.
I...”
– from When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams
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“Because what every woman knows each month when she bleeds is, I am not pregnant....”
– from When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams
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“True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.”
– When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams
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Surfaces
Surfaces serve
their own purposes,
strive to remain
constant (all lives
want that). There is
a skin, not just on
peaches but on oceans
(note the telltale
slough of foam on beaches).
Sometimes it’s loose,
as in the case
of cats: you feel how a
second life slides
under it. Sometimes it
fits. Take glass.
Sometimes it outlasts
its underside. Take reefs.
The private...
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“Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all...”
– “Elegy on a Toy Piano,” Dean Young
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SEEK ME OUT
LOOK AT LOOK AT LOOK AT LOOK AT ME
I’M ALL THE FISHES IN THE SEA
WAKE ME UP
GIVE ME GIVE ME GIVE ME WHAT YOU GOT
IN YOUR MIND, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
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“My heart’s made of parts of all that surround me
And that’s why the...”
– “Every Single Night,” Fiona Apple
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“You have a right to your actions,
but never to your actions’ fruits.
Act...”
– The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Stephen Mitchell
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“Even the wise man acts in accordance with his inner nature. All beings follow...”
– The Bhagavad Gita [3.32-35], translated by Stephen Mitchell
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SULLIVAN: I talked to Wayne Shorter earlier this week as he prepared for a show in New York City. He's been an avowed Buddhist for almost 40 years now, and he's pretty Zen about reimagining some of his old work.
SHORTER: Nothing is thrown away. Nothing goes away. It's - ice is getting ready to change to water. I used to ask when I was a kid: where do our words go? And I'm finding out.
SULLIVAN: Where?
SHORTER: They don't stop. They initiate cause and effect.
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“When you say something’s boring, that means you haven’t even...”
– Wayne Shorter, American jazz saxophonist and composer
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“For me, the word jazz means, I dare you. And the effort to break out of...”
– Wayne Shorter, American jazz saxophonist and composer
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“Las góndolas sin remos
de las ideas, cruzan
el agua tenebrosa
de tus iris...”
– “El lagarto viejo” (The Old Lizard), Federico García Lorca
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“¿Qué buscáis en la senda,
filósofo cegato,
si el fantasma indeciso
de la...”
– “El lagarto viejo” (The Old Lizard), Federico García Lorca
January 2013
4 posts
3 tags
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.”
– Mark Twain
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“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)
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When one train passes another in the opposing direction, the air between must split, each of its particles twinned and racing for the same location before the decision can be prearranged. We went this way. A long slow curve across the beauty of the world which at this speed is finally and clearly perceptible as a suspension of flight; some flying thing with a permanently held breath. Some...
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“The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless,
and the gravities,...”
– Greg Glazner, “You’re arrowing out toward what.”
December 2012
2 posts
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“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early...”
– “When Women Were Birds,” Terry Tempest Williams
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“Ahora soy: sólo hoy tenemos y creamos.
Nada nos es ajeno.
Nuestra la tierra....”
– “Mujer Negra,” Nancy Morejón
November 2012
7 posts
7 tags
“Whatever you think about frequently becomes the inclination of your mind.”
– Gil Fronsdal on gratitude (Insight Meditation Center)
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“Like flocks of small dark birds,
hidden parts of the self weep at these narrow...”
– “Looking at Your Hand,” Ruth Stone
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“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem...”
– “Mayakovsky,” Frank O’Hara
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“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within...”
– Thich Naht Hanh
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“Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.
I thought I wanted the...”
– “Shamanism 101,” Dean Young
October 2012
3 posts
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“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having...”
– Anonymous, Shoshone. (via thisbirdhasflown)
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Within This Tree
Within this tree another tree inhabits the same body; within this stone another stone rests, its many shades of grey the same, its identical surface and weight. And within my body, another body, whose history, waiting, sings; there is no other body, it sings, there is no other world.
Jane Hirshfield
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All poems are love poems. Some poems are better off dead. Right now I want something I don’t believe in.
from “Blue or Green,” James Galvin
September 2012
9 posts
5 tags
mythologyofblue:
The more I go, the harder it becomes to return. To anywhere.
-Jennifer Denrow
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Narcissus
Some years ago I recall someone paid attention, like when an invalid half rises, gripping an armchair— the street captains and priests busy clicking latches. The homeless withdrew their luxuries. At night, distant highways whispered long sighs to the world.
How many hours have I spent crushing mangrove leaves, turning my face to the unbearable grandeur of this heat-soaked sky? When I spun around,...
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Full Flight by Bob Hicok
I’m in a plane that will not be flown into a building. It’s a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers...
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“A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be...”
– “The Lost Son,” Theodore Roethke 