It’s so fragile anything can kill it— one cold night, the smoking chimney too far off in the distance, another drought, everyone at the table either drunk or estranged; but like a fisted bud, it rides out even the deluge that bends bough to ground, and so persists—sometimes unsure, like leaves curling and uncurling outside […]
Poetry
The Pity of the World Has Leaked
Carol Ann Duffy Carol Ann Duffy, England’s poet laureate, has assembled a remarkable trove of poems written by “senior” British poets about ageing. Published in the Guardian, the selection reflects Duffy’s deft hand (and I mean that as a compliment.) I read them all and was moved by every one. Here are two that stood […]
Sages of Silence and Fear
A painter and a poet. Martin and Stafford have been (and continue to be) elemental influences on me. *** Agnes Martin (Photo: Charles R. Rushton) To discover the conscious mind in a world where intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude, quite a lot of solitude. We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. […]
- Aesthetics
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A Beyond of Color
Rainer Maria Rilke More on the theme of poets and artists: Good friend Sally Reed steered me to a slender volume, Letters on Cézanne by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. These letters were written mostly to his wife Clara while he was living in Paris in 1907, a time when he was spellbound by Cézanne’s […]
Up and Down: Auden
The second half of the Auden pairing (see yesterday’s post): Up There (for Anne Weiss) Men would never have come to need an attic. Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build Special cabinets for them, date on, index Each new specimen: only women cling to Items out of their past they have no use […]
- Architecture
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Poetry and Space
One of the treasures I found on a recent visit to San Francisco’s famed art/architecture/design bookstore mecca, William Stout, is Jill Stoner’s Poems for Architects. The book was new to me, which isn’t surprising given it was published by the in house publishing division, William Stout Publishers.* Stoner is an architect who also studied poetry, […]
Women and Wilderness
View of the wilderness in New Mexico from my friend Anne’s remote home Women Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under […]
Hand in the Water
Sometimes the online world reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s image from Haroun and the Sea of Stories: In this tale written for children (putatively) stories live in the sea like currents. All you have to do is sit in your boat, reach your hand into the water and pull one in. Yesterday’s post about Diane […]
Shape-Shifters and Magical Reinventors, All
My admiration for Diane Ackerman dates from my first encounter with her unique blend of earthy spiritualism and a poetic sense of the material world. A Natural History of the Senses was published in 1993, and I have been shadowing her ever since. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, writer Paul West. […]
God Gutters Down to Metaphor
Continuing on the theme of 19th century masters (an earlier post this week featured Paul Cézanne) here’s a poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon (whose work was featured previously here) about Vincent Van Gogh: A Portrait of the Artist (for Colin Middleton) Shivering in the darkness Of pits, slag-heaps, beetroot fields, I gasp for light […]