I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,laid out by the mast, amidships,the great ring-giver. Far fetched treasur...
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.
And you, Tacitus,observe how I make my groveon an old crannogpiled by the fearful dead:a desolate peace.Our mother groundin sour with the bloodof her faithful,they lie garglingin her sacred heartas th...
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
This morning from a dewy motorwayI saw the new camp for the internees:A bomb had left a crater of fresh clayIn the roadside, and over in the treesMachine-gun posts defined a real stockade.There was th...