“Anyone who averts his eyes from the hopeless lives many of our fellow citizens lead and tells himself and others that these men and women only have themselves to blame, is either a fool or a soulless bastard.”
Read Simic’s entire article here.
Month: October 2013
Wendell Berry on Bees, Earth and Congress
Bill Moyers recently interviewed poet Wendell Berry on Moyers & Company.
Watch the full episode here.
Sick House at Heron Tree
I have a new (actually it’s kind of an old) poem published at Heron Tree. It’s nothing about herons or trees. The idea came from a story I heard about a family in Charleston during a yellow fever outbreak. Don’t get too hung up on the facts.
You can read the poem here. Many thanks to the folks at Heron Tree for selecting it.
And here’s a heron photo, shot at Nockamixon State Park in Bucks County PA.
Poets on Poetry: Quotes, Mostly
What would we get if accountants and waiters and bowling alley attendants talked about their occupations the way poets do?
Anyway…
This…
“The realm of conventionally articulate speech is not sufficient for saying what needs to be said.”
Nathaniel Mackey
“Yet the very incapacity of language to match the world allows it to do service as a medium of differentiation.”
Lyn Hejinian
“A poem’s task is to seduce—its readers or listeners must find in it something irresistible, something to which they want to surrender.”
Jane Hirshfield
“For me a poem must go beyond its setting or its particular to say outright or by subtle suggestion something about the human condition. If the gift without the giver is bare, the poem without the concept is emaciated…”
Maxine Kumin
“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself to, all the way to the reader. The poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.”
Charles Olson
but…
“Concentration on technique can absorb the attention while unacknowledged material enters the language; so technique can facilitate inspiration.”
Donald Hall
and…
“One has to know his tools, so he doesn’t work against himself. Tools make the job easier. More accuracy.”
Yusef Komunyakaa
“For it is not the greatness, the intensity, of the emotion, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”
T.S. Eliot
“I caution against communication, because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.”
Richard Hugo
Ah…
“Whatever else we may think of this world—it is astonishing.”
Wislawa Szymborska
Yes…
“Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.”
Kim Addonizio
Finally:
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth… patience is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Most poets write the same poem over and over.
Richard Hugo
Grant Clauser 