poetry – Page 2 – CLARITY AND CHAOS

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open. —Muriel Rukeyser

Went out to buy a book by the new Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, bought the new rupi kaur “The Sun and Her Flowers” instead. I’m fine with that.

[…] we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight. Memorial Day by Reginald Gibbons, from Last Lake (University of Chicago Press: 2016)

I was given nothing but the air, and the air dazzled. Joy Katz: All You Do Is Perceive (Four Way Books, 2013)

Books are door-shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone. Margarita Engle “Tula [Books are door-shaped]”

Every poem is a scene of language. It is a rite without a ceremony. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)

And that disturbing loss of equilibrium, that radical redefinition of time, that entry into an atemporal present, is one of the key features of lyric poetry. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)

I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries. No, not exactly, since the smallest was a miserable philosophy. Elizabeth Bishop “Crusoe in England” Geography III. Farrar. (1976)

And if sun comes How shall we greet him? Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him After so lengthy a Session with shade? Gwendolyn Brooks “truth” in Annie Allen. Greenwood Press (1949)

I really love you, believe me. It is something I inherited from my mother. From Attila József’s “Attila József” which Edward Hirsch calls his “love poem to himself.”