Mary MacLane
There is within me a thing that is aching, aching, aching always as the days pass. — Mary MacLane, I Await The Devil’s Coming. (Melville House; Reprint edition, March 19, 2013) Originally published April 26th 1902.
Day: December 7, 2017
Theodore Roethke
I Knew a Woman I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek… Continue reading Theodore Roethke
W.S. Merwin
I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? — W.S. Merwin
Paul Guest
You lie in bed at 4:30 in the morning wishing her hair would wash over you like river silt and change the course you’re on. A good word would be meander. It’s a breath, more than you ever wanted to spend on the way suffering bends like an elbow or a stream in your backyard… Continue reading Paul Guest
Friedrich Nietzsche
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes? — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Ernst Shcmeitzner, 1883-1885)
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
You are the moon, dear love, and I the sea: The tide of hope swells high within my breast, And hides the rough dark rocks of life’s unrest When your fond eyes smile near in perigee. But when that loving face is turned from me, Low falls the tide, and the grim rocks appear, And… Continue reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Martin Heidegger
Merely to say the same thing twice—language is language—how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just to where we are already. — Martin Heidegger, from “Language,” Poetry, Language, Thought. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Later Printing Used edition, December… Continue reading Martin Heidegger
Alison Hawthorne Deming
There was one crystal bell with a ruby glass handle that had no tongue and didn’t ring, just waited to be broken. I never thought before today to tell you how scared I was of a thing so fragile, how much I loved the sound it could have made, as if all the times I… Continue reading Alison Hawthorne Deming
Philip Larkin
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. — Philip Larkin
Dean Young
On mornings when I hope you forget my name, I walk through the high wet weeds that don’t have names either. I do not remember the word dew. I do not remember what I told you with your ear in my teeth. —Dean Young, from “Selected Recent and New Errors,” Bender: New and Selected Poems… Continue reading Dean Young
The Vale of Soul-Making 