cycles

[Image: “Magnet Loop Swirls,” from the Flickr account of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The caption there reads: “A close up of an active region in extreme UV light reveals tangles of loops and coils of arcs. This static image of particles spinning along magnetic field lines conceals the fact that the dynamic region is in motion every second.”]

From whiskey river :

Sunstone
(excerpt from a much longer poem)
I heard my blood, singing in its prison,
and the sea sang with a murmur of light,
one by one the walls gave way,
all of the doors were broken down,
and the sun came bursting through my forehead,
it tore apart my closed lids,
cut loose my being from its wrappers,
and pulled me out of myself to wake me
from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone.

(Octavio Paz [source: various, but here is a good place to start])

…and:

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say “We loved the earth but could not stay.”

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Don’t talk to me about the stars, about how cold and indifferent they are, about the unimaginable distances. There are millions of stars within us that are just as far, and people like me sometimes burn up a whole life trying to reach them.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

The Magic Mountain
A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford [source])

[Read more…]

[Image: “happy 1st day of january, ’11,” by user “muffett68” on Flickr.]

From whiskey river:

This Blank Page

is where I begin to exist. See, and already you
begin to know me, an insistence somewhere
that your eyes transmute into Voice—thence
the somebody as much as I am that you
apprehend. But I am more arrogant than this, I
am here before you, making the paths through
blank lines of space,
a detergent across the glass of your language,
restoring the shock of perspective
to the household kitchen window
(the view that you had grown up with
till you could see behind all the fences)
so that, following the footprints of my eyes
already quite outside the walls of
this page
you may be lured somewhere further enough to be
more than the small note that was
extension of me.

(Thomas Shapcott [source])

…and:

Last Spring

Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow.

(Gottfried Benn [source])

…and:

Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.

Stay open and ignorant.

(Grace Paley [source])

[Read more…]

Breaking Free or Closing the Loop: You Choose

Fresh Starts