A Conversation

Henry Gould: We are in the midst of the Effusive Era. Gusts of hyperbolic rage, or emotional bursts of exaggerated praise, tactical Kabuki dances from the licensed literati. I’m in favor of more diffidence & circumspection, detachment, objectivity & choosiness when discussing poets, poems.

Lisa McCabe: We don't do the poems or the poet any favor when everything is 'stunning'. 'Stunning' is the language of real estate agents trying to sell houses with granite countertops.

Henry Gould: Every reading everyone attends is awesome and overwhelming, heartbreaking and glorious.

Lisa McCabe: Support, promotion, highlighting good work and great work -- it's all good, but we also need to maintain a sense of proportionality. If everyone is shouting, nobody is heard.

Lisa McCabe: That all said, I still love expressions of enthusiasm. ;)

Henry Gould: Yes, it’s encouraging and gratifying. But people should also be aware of something deeper, better, more powerful, more perfect, in mysterious poetry, toward which they can aspire.

Reverting to Type

If you say that someone has reverted to type, you mean that they are now behaving as you would expect them to, after having behaved in an unexpected and better way.

We are not the same

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

By Michelle Goldberg

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Retropolis

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Trump is ignoring the lessons of 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions, historian says

Brandon Triminio

Don't let your life change your dreams ... Rather, let your dreams change your life.
- Brandon Triminio

In Search

You went out in search of gold far and wide, but all along you were gold on the inside.

- Rumi, Masnavi, I:2305

Frederick Buechner

I THINK OF A PERSON I haven't seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife's and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.

I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: "You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten."

-Frederick Buechner Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Carl Sagan

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Carl Sagan

Precious

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

How do you Listen

“How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Carl Sagan

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
-Carl Sagan

Wax Dolls

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Ways of Seeing

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

What we Love

“What we love we are.”
― Robert Lowell

The Dead Season

“The dead season when wolves live off the wind.”
― Robert Lowell

Hypochondriac

“In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.”
― Robert Lowell, Notebook

Manic Depression

“It's not a visitation by angels, but a weakening in the blood

a magical orange grove in a nightmare”
― Robert Lowell

The Light

“The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.”
― Robert Lowell

“In the end, there is no end.”
― Robert Lowell

“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”
― Robert Lowell

Richard Wilbur

“All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know”
― Richard Wilbur

“Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.”
― Richard Wilbur

“Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze”
― Richard Wilbur