Miscellaneous Poetry
HISTORIC MOMENT:
The man said,
after inventing poetry,
WOW!
and did a full somersault.
More Poems
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand from "Eating Poetry" in Reasons for Moving
Please note that these poems are reproduced without permission and are intended purely to share my pleasure in the following pages of poetry with my small group of interested friends. Their words are so delicious and sensuous to this Granny, who grew up in the chilly, vernacular world of the rural prairie in Stearns County, Minnesota, during the Second World War. We should spend our entire social security checks on these books of poetry.
To deftly do what many dimly think;
To fund a feeling for the world to borrow;
To turn a tear to printer's ink;
To make a sonnet of a sorrow.
Edmund Vance Cooke
Poetry is concerned with using
with abusing, with losing with wanting,
with denying with avoiding with adoring
with replacing the noun. It is doing that always
doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that.
Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is
what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no
matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a
great many kinds of poetry.
Gertrude Stein
On the Mountain of Boiled Rice I met Tu Fu,
Wearing a bamboo hat in the hot midday;
Pray, how is it that you have grown so thin?
Is it because you suffer from poetry?
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . .
the fertility of the soil,
the magic of animals,
the power-vision in solitude,
the terrifying initiation and rebirth,
the love and ecstasy of the dance,
the common work of the tribe.
I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind,
that my poems may approach the true measure of things
and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Gary Snyder
I am thinking of the lilac-trees,
That shook their purple plumes,
And when the sash was open,
Shed fragrance through the room.
Anna S. Stephens
enjoy these various and delicious favorite poems...
then read even more of my favorite poems on these topics:
God, give us a long winter
and quiet music, and patient mouths,
and a little pride
before our age ends.
Give us astonishment and a flame, high, bright.
Adam Zagajewski
