poetry – Page 3 – CLARITY AND CHAOS

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.”

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. W.B. Yeats Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) (facebook I twitter I instagram)

Writing is embodiment. Reading is contact. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) (facebook I twitter I instagram)

No, I don’t feel death coming. I feel death going: having thrown up his hands, for the moment. James Baldwin. “Amen.” Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. Beacon Press. (2014)(facebook I twitter I instagram)

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. Elizabeth Bishop “One Art” in Geography III (1977)

Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said […] Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets. William Carlos Williams(Hirsch 1999, p.13)

How Emily Dickinson Recognized True Poetry

Emily Dickinson’s test of poetry:If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there …

Continue reading “How Emily Dickinson Recognized True Poetry”

I finished Zadie Smith’s Swing Time this morning. I liked, but did not love it. (more on that maybe later.) Towards the end, the narrator reads Baldwin to someone – so I’m reading Baldwin’s poetry collection as my first book of #nationalpoetrymonth.