Things to Think by Robert Bly Think in ways you’ve never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you’ve ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats. Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a…
Category: Poetry
Notes on Melancholy, part 4
In my first note on melancholy I quoted the following question raised by Jacky Bowring, she asked: How can things that are sorrowful be beautiful? Louise Glück’s First Snow is not a theoretical answer, but a wonderful demonstration of something deeply sorrowful becoming almost unbearably beautiful – First Snow by Louise Glück Like a child, the earth’s going to…
This fear we call stress
Following the Road by Larry Smith from A River Remains. © Word Tech Editions, 2006. I have left my wife at the airport, flying out to help our daughter whose baby will not eat. And I am driving on to Kent to hear some poets read tonight. I don’t know what to do with…
Ars Poetica XIII
The space between two languages is a space like no other. — Anne Carson . Writing anything at all is a work of translation exactly comparable to that of transmuting a text from one language into another. — Paul Valéry .
Ars Poetica XII: Art is a question
In my last post I offered a few points from Siri Hustvedt’s truly interesting essay on Louise Bourgeois. One of the things I have been thinking about since, is Hustvedt’s assertion that: A work of art is always part person, that is: a work of art is part-thing-part-person, it is this aliveness – according to…
Short Talk On Housing
I have entered a new year of bookish life together with an old friend of mine, Anne Carson, or her texts, to be more precise. Close reading, slowly finding my way through her Short Talks. Here is how today started: Short Talk On Housing Here is one thing you can do if you have no…
. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. . ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus NOVEMBER TWO BLUE (2013), from Reading November Series © Mary Ellen Bartley .
Winter Grace
If you have seen the snow (…) slowly falling into the brook to be swallowed by water, then you have seen beauty Peter Brook: Misty Morning, 1975 .. If you have seen the snow under the lamppost piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table or somewhere slowly falling into the brook to…
Art on art
When your head gets filled with too much theory – try art: A SHORT TALK ON THE END What is the difference between light and lighting? There is an etching called The Three Crosses by Rembrandt. It is a picture of the earth and the sky and Calvary. A moment rains down on them. The…
sub rosa 