“. . . That the poems we snatch from the language must bear the habit of our thinking.
That their arrangement strengthens the authority on which each separate line is laid.
That they extend the line into perpetuity.
That they enlarge the circle.
That they awaken the dreamer. That they awaken the schemer.
That they rectify the names.
That they draw not conclusions but further qualify doubt. . . . .”
(p. 39; fr. 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; pub. 2016, Copper Canyon Press)
(image: mpw)
From Bento’s Sketchbook, a quote from Spinoza’s Ethics:
“We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in the memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.”
(Ethics, Part V, Proposition XXIII)
(excerpt from The Life of Poetry (Introduction) :
“In times of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of the turning may be very long. It may hardly exist.”
With thanks to Innisfree editor Greg McBride for publishing the above poem in the current issue.
See also poet and essayist Rod Jellema’s essays on James Wright, Donald Hall, and Louis Simpson, in the same issue.
“After”, graphite, acrylic, wax on paper; 26″ x 39.5″, 2017
