You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangentWhen they make the circle wide, it's time to swim Out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own fr...
Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
Once off the bushThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.I always felt like crying. It wasn't fairThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
If self is a location, so is love:Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,Here and there and now and then, a stance.
Bebeorh þé ðone bealo-níð, Béowulf léofa,secg betsta, ond þé þæt sélre gecéos,éce rǽdas; ofer-hýda ne gým,mǽre cempa! Nú is þines mægnes blǽdáne hwíle; eft sóna biðþæt þec ádl oððe ecg eafoþes getwǽfe...
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousnes...
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowedofferings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hear...
Meanwhile, the swordbegan to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all melted as ice melts when the Father eases the fetters off the frostand unravels the w...
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive opera...
It is a great wonderHow Almighty God in his magnificenceFavors our race with rank and scopeAnd the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.Sometimes He allows the mind of a manOf distinguished birth to follo...
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny dinWas soon soused. They wer...
Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start--poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through...
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerou...
The hall towered,gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in ituntil the black raven with raucous gleeannounced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightnessoverran the shadows.
Late August, given heavy rain and sunFor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.At first, just one, a glossy purple clotAmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.You ate that first one and its flesh...
And here is lovelike a tinsmith's scoopsunk past its gleanin the meal-bin.--Sunlight
The diamond absolutes.I am neither internee nor informer;An inner emigre, grown long-hairedAnd thoughtful; a wood-kerneEscaped from the massacre,Taking protective colouringFrom bole and bark, feelingE...
Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there a...