On Poetry.
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 117.
“Poetry is accelerated thinking.”
“Poetry is the best words in the best order.”
“Poetry is stored magic.”
“Poetry restores us to what is deepest in us. It consoles us.”
“The greatest poetry is written at the borders of what can be said. It makes a strong effort at expressing the unsayable.”
“The meaning of poetry is to give you courage.”
“The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
The impact of reading poetry.
“A poem pierces the shimmering surfaces of the modern world and somehow penetrates the core of reality itself.”
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know. Is there another way? “
“In an old book. I stumbled across a saying.It was like a stranger.Punching me in the face.”
“Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished, as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish-to let others vanish-without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art.”
Most of all it gives us the courage to speak up and to recognize authentic voices..
“Where the voice that is in us makes a true response. Where the voice that is great within us rises up”
Poetry reminding us of what we need today.
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
forever.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Poetry and the beat of time
From Sunlight on Garden. By Louis MacNeice
The sunlight in the garden
Hardens and grows cold
We cannot cage the minute
Within its net of gold
Lines on a young lady’s photograph album. By Phil Larkin
At last, you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.
My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose -
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat
Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.
In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Invariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.
Poetry’s application to current events.
Shakespeare on social media.
“All the world’s a stage.
And all the men and women merely players.
The all have their exits and entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
Seeking the bubble reputation.”
William Wordsworth on the competitive world of work and consumption.
“The world is too much with us.
Late and soon
Getting and spending
We lay waste to our powers.”
Yehuda Amichai on this past week’s events at Twitter
Here is a poem written nearly 10 years ago (with two phrases removed and nothing else changed) that serves as an elegy and lamentation for this week’s events at Twitter.
A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
They amputated
As far as I am concerned
They are surgeons. All of them.
They dismantle us.
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned.
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala
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All poetry is about loneliness. The individual's desperate desire to believe that others can know what goes on inside their head, all of humanity's deep need to believe that we are not alone in the universe, the impossibility that "love" can ever really live up to the idea of it, and the absolute certainty that nobody is getting out of here alive which we easily grasp and yet our imaginations can't go there. A deep emotion so strong that we must find a way to somehow externalize it, futile as that might be - that is poetry.
Thank you for sharing these beautiful poems. Just like music, poetry takes us to a much higher world in which thoughts and emotions are expressed freely, genuinely, and boldly without the constraints of time and space.