“...the poet’s work is to make a private vision public—through the stubborn, 

inadequate, infinitely flexible medium of language...”

Jeffrey Skinner, from The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets

(American Life in Poetry: Column 382  by Ted Kooser)

The Promise by Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

Gather
by Rose McLarney

Some springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.

Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples
glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,
the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.

You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.
You could say, Some years, there are apples.

Prophecy               by Dana Gioia 

Sometimes a child will stare out of a window
for a moment or an hour—deciphering
the future from a dusky summer sky.

Does he imagine that some wisp of cloud
reveals the signature of things to come?
Or that the world’s a book we learn to translate?

And sometimes a girl stands naked by a mirror
imagining beauty in a stranger's eyes
finding a place where fear leads to desire.

For what is prophecy but the first inkling
of what we ourselves must call into being?
The call need not be large. No voice in thunder.

It's not so much what's spoken as what's heard—
and recognized, of course. The gift is listening
and hearing what is only meant for you.

Life has its mysteries, annunciations,
and some must wear a crown of thorns. I found
my Via Dolorosa in your love.

And sometimes we proceed by prophecy,
or not at all—even if only to know
what destiny requires us to renounce.

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,
ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.
Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.

In the green torpor of the afternoon,
bless us with ennui and quietude.
And grant us only what we fear, so that

Underneath the murmur of the wasp
we hear the dry grass bending in the wind
and the spider's silken whisper from its web.

From Leavings, Sabbaths, 2008, VII., pp. 114-5 by Wendell Berry

Having written some pages in favor of Jesus,
I receive a solemn communication crediting me
with the possession of a "theology" by which
I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong
forever or forever right. Have I gauged exactly
enough the weights of sins: Have I found
too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or
the other way around? Have I found too much
pleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in this
our unreturning world? O Lord, please forgive
any smidgen of such distinctions I may
have still in my mind. I meant to leave them
all behind a long time ago. If I'm a theologian
I am one to the extent I have learned to duck
when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead,
dropping their loads of whitewash at random
on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.
Look down, look down, and save your soul
by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly
indifference this off-fall of the air. Christmas
night and Easter morning are this soil's only laws.
The depth and volume of the waters of baptism,
the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks
of those most surely saved, God's own only true
interpretation of the Scripture: these would be
causes of eternal amusement, could we forget
how we have hated one another, how vilified
and hurt and killed one another, bloodying
the world, by means of such questions, wrongly
asked, never to be rightly answered, but asked and
wrongly answered, hour after hour, day after day,
year after year--such is my belief--in Hell.

For those of us who are not physicists, some excerpts
considering the theory of relativity, from the book,
Einstein: His Live and Universe, by Walter Isaacson:


"Einstein...had produced one of history's most imaginative and dramatic revisions of our concepts about the universe. The general theory of relativity was not merely the interpretation of some experimental data or the discovery of a more accurate set of laws. It was a whole new way of regarding reality" (p. 223).

"Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter, and energy" (physicist, Brian Greene, quoted on p. 220).

"For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a 'God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.'

"Einstein considered this feeling of reverence, this cosmic religion, to be the wellspring of all true art and science. It was what guided him. 'When I am judging a theory,' he said, 'I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.' It is also what graced him with his beautiful mix of confidence and awe" (p. 551).

True sanctity does not consist in trying to live without...[possessions]. It consists in using the goods of life in order to do the will of God. It consists in using God's creation in such a way that everything we touch and see and use and love gives new glory to God.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950): 137

"In his Autobiography (1951), [William Carlos] Williams explains that his goal as a writer is to capture the 'immediacy' of experience: 'It is an identifiable thing, and its characteristic, its chief character is that it is sure, all of a piece and, as I have said, instant and perfect: it comes, it is there, and it vanishes. But I have seen it, clearly. I have seen it.'”

(Adam Kirsch in a New York Review of Books review of three Williams biographies, February 2012)

Wendell Berry, from Against the Nihil of the Age

The predicament of a visionary poet at any time is difficult.
The poems one desires to write cannot be written merely by
desire, or by intellect or learning or will or technical
artistry--though they also cannot be written without desire,
intellect, learning, will and artistry. Beyond all these, inspiration
must come, and when it comes one must be ready. The
readiness is everything. It involves everything listed above,
plus a life's work.

A Barred Owl, by Richard Wilbur

The warping night air having brought the boom

Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,

We tell the wakened child that all she heard

Was an odd question from a forest bird,

Asking of us, if rightly listened to,

“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

Can also thus domesticate a fear,

And send a small child back to sleep at night

Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight

Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw

Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Robin Wright, in her book, Rock the Casbah, "notes that several factors are proving detrimental to Al Qaeda’s long-term future, most notably its failure to offer any positive vision for building a society; its inability to provide constructive solutions for everyday issues like health care and jobs; its killing of Muslim civilians; and its ultrafundamentalist worldview. 

But while Mr. Bergen [Peter Bergan, in his book, The Longest War] worries that 'many thousands of underemployed, disaffected men in the Muslim world will continue to embrace bin Laden’s doctrine of violent anti-Westernism,' Ms. Wright is considerably more positive, asserting that a decade after 9/11, 'the Islamic world is now in the throes of a counterjihad' aimed at routing 'extremism in its many forms' and that this 'counterjihad will define the next decade as thoroughly as the extremists dominated the last one.'"
from a New York Times book review by Michiko Kakutani, August 1, 2011

J. D McClatchy said: "I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order — of feeling as well as argument — to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?"

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. 

It turns what we have into enough, and more. 

It turns denial into acceptance, chaos

to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn 

a meal into a feast, a house into a home, 

a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes

sense of our past, brings peace for today, 

and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Melody Beattie -

Place by W.S. Merwin (1927-)

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

(from The Rain in the Trees, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

Nature by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

"Many in this world run after felicity
like an absent man hunting for his hat,
while all the time it is on his head or
in his hand."

— Sydney Smith

The Enkindled Spring
by D. H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

from Complete Poems, published by Penguin Classics

Sonnet—Silence
by Edgar Allan Poe

There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence—sea and shore—
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities - "selves," that is to say, regarded as objects.

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions) 15

The House by Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow's walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

from Anterooms: New Poems and Translation
by Richard Wilbur

Denise Levertov wrote, "One is in despair over the current manifestation of malevolent imbecility and the seemingly invincible power of rapacity, yet finds oneself writing a poem about the trout lilies in the spring woods. And one has promised to speak at a meeting or help picket a building. If one is conscientious, the only solution is to attempt to weigh conflicting claims at each crucial moment, and in general to try to juggle well and keep all the oranges dancing in the air at once."

And, "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."

"Eavan Boland is often called a feminist poet. She said, 'I'm a feminist. I'm not a feminist poet. I've said somewhere else that I think feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason.'"

from Writer's Almanac, September 24, 2010

Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there's no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you've never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were—
will be waiting when you return.

"Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard. © Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

For the Chipmunk in My Yard

I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.

From What the Heart Can Bear by Robert Gibb, 2009, Autumn House Press

"I was myself the recipient of one of these [Academy of American Poets] prizes, in 1971. I felt the good things that a prize makes a young poet feel: heartened, a little more brave, confirmed in the notion that...my private scratchings and fumblings might become, if I could find ways to shape them, something that could speak to someone else," says Doty.

Mark Doty 2010