Re-Reading C.D. Wright, 10:30 p.m.

Posted on August 28, 2018 by

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“. . . 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)

 

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Thinking about Wallace Stevens….

Posted on June 16, 2018 by

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     “What is the poet’s subject?  It is his sense of the world.  The truth is that a man’s (one’s) sense of the world dictates his subjects to him, and that this sense is derived from his personality, his temperament, over which he has little control and possibly none, except superficially.  It is not a literary problem.  It’s the problem of his mind and nerves.  These sayings are another form of the saying that “Poets are born, not made”.  A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noonday.” (WS)

(image: mpw)

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Reading John Berger……

Posted on June 12, 2018 by

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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)

 

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Reading Muriel Rukeyser at 2 a.m.

Posted on May 27, 2018 by

"Doubletalk", detail – Version 2

(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.”

 

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Innisfree Poetry Journal – Issue 26

Posted on April 14, 2018 by

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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.

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New Work in the Studio

Posted on April 13, 2018 by

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“After”, graphite, acrylic, wax on paper; 26″ x 39.5″, 2017

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104 /2017

Posted on November 11, 2017 by

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