“This is what poetry does for me–both the reading and the writing of it–it helps me remember that each moment has the potential to open itself to me if I pay deep enough attention.”
—Ellen Bass, from “An Interview with Ellen Bass” by Patricia Clark, The Writer’s Chronicle (vol. 54, no. 3, February 2022)
“[Words] are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: “Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!”
It is the most fragile relationship in the world.
Colette calls a poem “that secret, that dried rose, that scar, that sin.” James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: “Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.”
In Hindu poetics, “a poem is recognised as such by those who have a heart.” If you do not have a heart, you cannot recognize a poem.
The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
“[Words] are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: “Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!”
It is the most fragile relationship in the world.
Colette calls a poem “that secret, that dried rose, that scar, that sin.” James Tate uses as an epigraph for one of his books a line by James Salter: “Here then, faintly discolored and liable to come apart if you touch it, is the corsage that I kept from the dance.”
In Hindu poetics, “a poem is recognised as such by those who have a heart.” If you do not have a heart, you cannot recognize a poem.
The heart is a small closed space, a symbol or souvenir of the inner life, the secret life, the silent life. It is liable to come apart if you touch it.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
