I hate being so emotionally slutty. I need to stop loving everyone I have a long conversation with.
Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.
I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.
To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.
"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.
No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.
Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.
The interaction of knowledge and skills with experience is key to learning.
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure.
This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.
Pray that God will open the doors you can't open and close the doors that need to be closed.