Drawing, and Silence

"Perhaps if people were encouraged to draw something everyday, they'd talk a lot less. They'd begin to appreciate the importance of silence, of observation, of not getting entangled in the outward appearance of things. By watching a pencil slowly follow the contours of the subject, they would learn to edit out the superfluous and the unnecessary; they'd perhaps learn to not just see things but also comprehend them."

In Silence: http://sometimesiwritesometimesiam.blogspot.in/2013/02/in-silence.html

Autumn

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves
Fall into the water.
And now in the moonlight they still fall,
But each leaf is fringed with silver.

Amy Lowell

On music, myth, and shapely speech

One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.

To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies.

To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against 
opportunistic mendacity.

If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and “language.”

It will be a polymer mold of  what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and 
immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?

Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Notebook
On music, myth, and shapely speech.
W. S. Di Piero

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245274

Lot's Wife

Do not look behind you.
--Gen. 19:17

So simple a mistake. They say I turned to look;
instead it was to listen. I did not know: only the dead
can stand the music of the spheres made mortal.

Caught in my hood, the hard chords of chaos:
the childish scream, the mother's litany as she names
the loss which instantly unnames her.

And then the inconceivable: between the flint
blast and the crack of iron, I heard
the burning of the scorched moth wing,

the lily as its petals crisp to white fire,
but more than these, the footfall
of a naked man who runs to nothing.

And so I chose this brine,
now crystals shift. The salt dissolves
and I want to speak.

Whore of all hopes, I now believe
some stories survive
in order to remake their endings.

Dana Littlepage Smith

So much light wrapping itself around us

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings - five feet apart -
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow -
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows -
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us -

as soft as feathers -
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light - scalding, aortal light -
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

Mary Oliver

Sonnet

Where it begins will remain a question
for the time being at least which is to
say for this lifetime and there is no
other life that can be this one again
and where it goes after that only one
at a time is ever about to know
though we have it by heart as one and though
we remind each other on occasion

How often may the clarinet rehearse
alone the one solo before the one
time that is heard after all the others
telling the one thing that they all tell of
it is the sole performance of a life
come back I say to it over the waters

"Sonnet" by W.S. Merwin, from Migration. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007.

Come with me then

You are tired

You are tired

(I think)

Of the always puzzle of living and doing;

And so am I.

Come with me then

And we'll leave it far and far away-

(Only you and I understand!)

You have played

(I think)

And broke the toys you were fondest of

And are a little tired now;

Tired of things that break and-

Just tired.

So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight

And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart-

Open to me!

For I will show you the places Nobody knows

And if you like

The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah come with me!

I'll blow you that wonderful bubble the moon

That floats forever and a day;

I'll sing you the jacinth song

Of the probable stars;

I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream

Until I find the Only Flower

Which shall keep (I think) your little heart

While the moon comes out of the sea.

e.e. cummings

To admit

To admit that what falls
falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.

From The New Intelligence, Timothy Donnelly

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

Ted Kooser

Maturity

"Maturity is first the shedding of what you are not, and then the balancing of what you are in relation to the human being you love, and allowing the selves of that person which are not related to you to exist independently, outside of the relationship."

Anaïs Nin in Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 5 1947-1955: Vol. 5

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/08/anais-nin-unfamiliar/

Inspiration is for amateurs

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Chuck Close

Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating by Maria Popova

What's all this stuff about motivation?

"What's all this stuff about motivation? I say, if you need motivation, you probably need more than motivation. You probably need chemical intervention or brain surgery. Actually, if you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me."

'Brain Droppings', George Carlin

There are days

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.
 
These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,--
A blue and gold mistake.

Emily Dickinson

Tender, luminous, and demanding

Maybe

Mary Oliver

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is

when something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,

the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --

tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was --
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.

The Place Of The Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

Wallace Stevens

"Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself": http://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.in/2013/01/not-ideas-about-thing-but-thing-itself.html