In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” contained in What Light Can Do, he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the […]
Poetry
We Are Pale Ramon
Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight. My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited […]
Consciousness of the Mountain
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays […]
Small Swishings of Joy
The last page of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations . . . Life Is Not What You expected — cows ruminate by the highway even in rain or bat their ears forward and back and how you thought the story of your life would get told: the children you thought you’d already have by now partially grown […]
Enduring the Mystery
A close up view of Candara, from a painting series inspired by space and planetary bodies 1. Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something That knows better won’t […]
Holding it All
Hold Everything Dear as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the […]
Fresh Coat
Unfolding If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history, No gradual growth of consciousness Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations, The bought elections, the betrayal of trust By party faction in the name of progress— What about spirit in the personal realm Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly That our best days seem […]
- Aesthetics
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Necessary Wildness
Wasatch Mountains in Utah (October 2011) Writing about writing poetry: It soothes my soul the way reading scriptures comforts believers. In an earlier post I referenced Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield (here), an inspiring and thoughtful meditation on how poetry comes into being. And now I have another to recommend: […]
- literature
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They Might Be Giants
T. S. Eliot Harold Bloom first wrote about his now famous theory of the anxiety of influence in the early 1970’s while I was in college. Bloom focused on poetry and traced the complex challenge facing a poet in search of his or her own unique voice while being inspired—and intimidated—by a powerful precursor. The […]
Leaving the Heavy Behind
The light in Canada Politics and art have been combined and comingled in the past, producing work that is powerful and provocative. Goya. Guernica. Beckmann. But that isn’t the case for me and my way of working. In fact mixing the two is a toxic brew. Over the last week I have had to conscientiously […]