Wind in a Box —after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and… Continue reading Terrance Hayes
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who… Continue reading Theodore Roosevelt
One of the ancient maps of the world is heart-shaped, carefully drawn and once washed with bright colors, though the colors have faded as you might expect feelings to fade from a fragile old heart, the brown map of a life. But feeling is indelible, and longing infinite, a starburst compass pointing in all the… Continue reading Ted Kooser
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men [or women]. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run about… Continue reading Ralph Waldo Emerson
To think of you surcharged with Loneliness. To hear your voice Over the recorder say, ‘Loneliness.’ The word, the voice, So full of it, and I with You away, so lost in it— — Kenneth Rexroth, from “Marthe Lonely,” section III of “Seven Poems For Marthe, My Wife,” Poetry (vol. LXXXIX, no. 1, October 1956)
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation…. Loving does not at first… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
In the branches of the laurel tree I saw two dark doves One was the sun and one the moon Little neighbors I said where is my grave — In my tail said the sun On my throat said the moon And I who was walking with the land around my waist saw two snow eagles… Continue reading Federico García Lorca
I think then that the first thing that a poet should do as he comes out of his cavern is to put on the strength of his particular calling as a poet, to address himself to what Rilke called the mighty burden of poetry and to have the courage to say that, in his sense… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Orange sunset in the deep shell of summer a long silence reaching across the dry pastures in the distance a dog barks at the sound of a door closing and at once I am older. — W.S. Merwin, “Ancient World,” The Moon Before Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)
I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that… Continue reading Samuel Beckett
The Vale of Soul-Making 