– I choose to steal to keep you all happy:
Here are some bits and pieces by David Orr
it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium. (…) The important thing is that you’d know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at loss, and you’d accept that confusion as part of the experience. … (To “get” Belgium, you need not know the Brussels phone book). … The art form (poetry) is enormous and perplexing, and at least half of it is of interest only to scholars and the certifiably disturbed. … As with a vacation in Belgium, all you need is a little patience and the motivation to book your tickets.
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (2011)
Introduction
And here, one of his poems
The Train
BY DAVID ORR
Not that anyone will care,
But as I was sitting there
On the 8:07
To New Haven,
I was struck by lightning.
The strangest thing
Wasn’t the flash of my hair
Catching on fire,
But the way people pretended
Nothing had happened.
For me, it was real enough.
But it seemed as if
The others saw this as nothing
But a way of happening,
A way to get from one place
To another place,
But not a place itself.
So, ignored, I burned to death.
Later, someone sat in my seat
And my ashes ruined his suit.
Poetry
It is all we have left of that
time when we thought with the body
alone, and didn’t know of the
existence of the mind. The rain
that looks like a wood-cut of rain
and turns the thought to
water splashes
against the window.
stolen or hand carved?