Category Archives: Uncategorized

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE

First, from the biography of David Hills: “Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.” Second, from Novalis, via Patti Smith: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” Third, from Hera Lindsay Bird’s Speech time: Poetry is a luxury behaviour Like crying becauseContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE”

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE

Good Bones by Maggie Smith via the Poetry Foundation. Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate,Continue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE”

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE

John Berryman’s Dream Song 14, via Laura Olin. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   we ourselves flash and yearn,and moreover my mother told me as a boy   (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   inner resources, becauseContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE”

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY

From Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (more excerpts from Maria Popova, here). I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. …. How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. IContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY”

FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN

Thanks, by W.S. Merwin. Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it standing by the windows looking out inContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN”