We are Cups

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Kurt Vonnegut

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

Vonnegut

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

George Orwell

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell

Orwell

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Burroughs

The face of evil is always the face of total need.
-William Burroughs

Silence

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
-William Burroughs

Wendell Berry

A Warning To My Readers

by Wendell Berry

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world.
I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies.
That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.

A wonder is what it is.

Wendell Berry

A Meeting

by Wendell Berry

In a dream I meet
my dead friend.
He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.

"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

Wendell Berry

The Real Work

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.


The mind that is not baffled is not employed.


The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Mark Strand

So You Say

by Mark Strand

It is all in the mind, you say, and has
nothing to do with happiness.
The coming of cold,
the coming of heat, the mind has all the time in the world.

You take my arm and say something will happen,
something unusual for which we were always prepared,
like the sun arriving after a day in Asia,
like the moon departing after a night with us.

Mark Strand

Coming To This

by Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.

We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.


And now we are here.

The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.

The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.

The wine waits.


Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.

We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Pinhole

This morning the sky was clear with one pinhole; Venus.
I was at my desk.
My cat opened the kitchen cupboard. My dog stuck his head in.
I reached for my pup. I could feel his monkey belly and chimpanzee elbows.

Last night the moon was a cop's flashlight shining on the street.
A far-away neighborhood had twinkling white lights.
The air was delicious.

"I am lucky, I live alone but I am never lonely," Jackie said.

Mark Strand

The New Poetry Handbook
by Mark Strand

1 If a man understands a poem,
he shall have troubles.


2 If a man lives with a poem,
he shall die lonely.


3 If a man lives with two poems,
he shall be unfaithful to one.


4 If a man conceives of a poem,
he shall have one less child.


5 If a man conceives of two poems,
he shall have two children less.


6 If a man wears a crown on his head as he writes,
he shall be found out.


7 If a man wears no crown on his head as he writes,
he shall deceive no one but himself.


8 If a man gets angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by men.


9 If a man continues to be angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by women.


10 If a man publicly denounces poetry,
his shoes will fill with urine.


11 If a man gives up poetry for power,
he shall have lots of power.


12 If a man brags about his poems,
he shall be loved by fools.


13 If a man brags about his poems and loves fools,
he shall write no more.


14 If a man craves attention because of his poems,
he shall be like a jackass in moonlight.


15 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow,
he shall have a beautiful mistress.


16 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow overly,
he shall drive his mistress away.


17 If a man claims the poem of another,
his heart shall double in size.


18 If a man lets his poems go naked,
he shall fear death.


19 If a man fears death,
he shall be saved by his poems.


20 If a man does not fear death,
he may or may not be saved by his poems.


21 If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion
and be kissed by white paper.

Mark Strand

The Remains

by Mark Strand

I empty myself of the names of others.
I empty my pockets.

I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.

At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.


What good does it do? The hours have done their job.

I say my own name.
I say goodbye.

The words follow each other downwind.

I love my wife but send her away.


My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds.
How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am.
I change and I am the same.

I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

Mark Strand

The Dreadful Has Already Happened

by Mark Strand

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.

They moisten their lips with their tongues.
I can feel
them urging me on.
I hold the baby in the air.

Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.


A small band is playing old fashioned marches.

My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.

My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving
to somebody else.
There are palm trees.


The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall
billowy clouds move beyond them.
"Go on, Boy,"
I hear somebody say, "Go on."
I keep wondering if it will rain.


The sky darkens.
There is thunder.

"Break his legs," says one of my aunts,
"Now give him a kiss."
I do what I'm told.

The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.


The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies.
The relatives cheered.

It was about that time I gave up.


Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search
I find his feet.
He is what is left of my life.

Romeo

After Romeo and I played fetch he was smiling with his tongue hanging out. The muddy ball was still in his mouth. He looked like the Buster Brown shoes dog. He tanked up on water and I fed him. Then we walked downtown so he could leave his business card on every shrub.