Month: September 2018

Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a very fast pace.

Jericho Brown
interview with Kate Kellaway for the Guardian newspaper 28th July 2018

I love the rain. I love how it softens the outlines of things. The world becomes softly blurred, and I feel like I melt right into it.

Hanamoto Hagumi
Honey and Clover

We stumbled upon the Preston Pele Tower, fifteen miles south-west of Bamburgh, back in February, 2018. My wife and I had seen a reference to it on a noticeboard in a cafe some distance to the north. It’s quite hard to find; tucked away down a tiny country lane not far from the A1 – the main road through Northumberland to Edinburgh. We’d never heard of a Pele Tower, either… We got out of the car and stared at it, never having seen anything quite like it. Was it a castle – or the remains of one? The location suggested not. It looked purpose-built, yet somehow incomplete….

Right up to the time the Castles of the Mind group approached the building, I didn’t know what part of the ‘self’ we could use it to describe. I entered the (to me) familiar building and trusted that the answer would reveal…

In a column by Post opinion writer Helaine Olen, she points out the “staggering hypocrisy” of Brett Kavanaugh.

He has said he doesn’t want to answer questions about his personal life, yet when he worked on the investigation of Bill Clinton, he zealously pursued prurient details about the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky.

“Kavanaugh was not only a part of special counsel Ken Starr’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he was also one of the lead Torquemadas of it — zealous in the pursuit of his goal to the point of cruelty. If Kavanaugh’s nomination survives till Thursday’s scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, at least one senator should ask him why he thought it was so necessary to ask Clinton such graphic questions about Lewinsky.

“Let me be clear: Kavanaugh not only thought Clinton needed to be questioned about his relations with Lewinsky; he also…

We’re all born a Witch. We’re all born into magic. It’s taken from us as we grow up.

Madeleine L’Engle
The Crosswicks Journal

I believe strongly that what we do as poets is but a variant of what the musician does, what the historian does, what the storyteller does, what the painter and what the sculptor does and what film makers do. My work as a poet relies on interdependence. I write in solitude but my work is not solitary. I am partner at one time with painters in whose work I see poems, in other times with composers’ work in which I hear the lines of poems, even in critical pieces containing the language of poetry.

Darrel Bourque
Call and Response: Conversations in Verse

The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech — waiting, listening, and silence.

C.D. Wright
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

(How’s that for a title, boys and girls?)