Great Throughts Treasury

"In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter."

"The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn."

"When, on your dangerous mission gone, You underrate our foes as dunces, Be wary, not of sudden gun, But of your partner at the dances. "

"Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am. "

"When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose. "

"Toward dawn we shared with you your hour of desolation, the huge lingering passion of your unearthly outcry, as you swung your blind head towards us and laboriously opened a bloodshot, glistening eye, in which we swam with terror and recognition. "

"Miss Murphy in first grade wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the storm tracks of the milky way at frightful speed and if it wandered off its course and smashed into the earth there'd be no school tomorrow. "

"In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: Live in the layers,not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it. no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes "

" I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which the scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind, the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn. I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through the wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: -Live in the layers, not on the litter- Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. "

"Few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed. "

"End with an image and don't explain. "

"Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare. "

"I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each way."

"In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking. "

"I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings."

"Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work. "

"I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred. "

"The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers. "

"Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race."

"We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection. "

"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life. "

"To be rocked by the infinite!"

"What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. "

"You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin. "

"A common fallacy is to think that a poem begins with a meaning which then gets dressed up in words. On the contrary, a poem is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning."

"A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed."

"All summer I heard them rustling in the shrubbery, outracing me from tier to tier in my garden, a whisper among the viburnums, a signal flashed from the hedgerow, a shadow pulsing in the barberry thicket. Now that the nights are chill and the annuals spent, I should have thought them gone, in a torpor of blood slipped to the nether world before the sickle frost. Not so. In the deceptive balm of noon, as if defiant of the curse that spoiled another garden, these two appear on show through a narrow slit in the dense green brocade of a north-country spruce, dangling head-down, entwined in a brazen love-knot. I put out my hand and stroke the fine, dry grit of their skins. After all, we are partners in this land, co-signers of a covenant. At my touch the wild braid of creation trembles."

"An agitation of the air, a perturbation of the light admonished me the unloved year would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field amid the stubble and the stones amaded, while a small worm lisped to me the song of my marrow-bones. Blue poured into summer blue, a hawk broke from his cloudless tower, the roof of the silo blazed, and i knew that part of my life was forever over. Already the iron door of the north clangs open: birds, leaves, snows order their populations forth, and a cruel wind blows."

"A single glance: a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . ."

"A poet without a strong libido almost inevitably belongs to the weaker category; such a poet can carry off a technical effect with a degree of flourish, but the poem does not embody the dominant emotive element in the life process. The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem?"

"As if I were composed of dust and air, the shape confronting me upon the stair (Athlete of shadow, lighted by a stain on its disjunctive breast--I saw it plain--) moved through my middle flesh. I turned around, shaken and it was marching without sound beyond the door; and when my hand was taken from my mouth to beat the standing heart, I cried my distant name, thinking myself had died. One moment I was entered; one moment then I knew a total century of pain between the twinkling of two thoughts. The ghost knocked on my ribs, demanding, "Host! Host! I am diseased with motion. Give me bread before I quickly go. Shall I be fed?" Yielding, I begged of him: "Partake of me. Whatever runneth from the artery, this body and its unfamiliar wine, stored in whatever dark of love, are thine." But he denied me, saying, "Every part of thee is given, yea, thy flesh, thy heart.""

"And you need the silence. So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn?t say as much as in what it does say. As when a flower is preparing to bloom, or after it has bloomed, when it is suspending its strengths and its potency and is at rest?or seems to be, its mission to flower and to produce seed having been fulfilled."

"Before I am completely shriven I shall reject my inch of heaven. Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink into my deepest self; there drink memory down. The banner of my blood, unfurled, will not be love, only the pity and the pride of it, pinned to my open side. When I have utterly refined the composition of my mind, shaped language of my marrow till its forms are instant to my will, suffered the leaf of my heart to fall under the wind, and, stripping all the tender blanket from my bone, rise like a skeleton in the sun, I shall have risen to disown the good mortality I won. Directly risen with the stain of life upon my crested brain, which I shall shake against my ghost to frighten him, when I am lost. Gladly as any poison, yield my halved conscience, brightly peeled; infect him, since we live but once, with the unused evil in my bones. I'll shed the tear of souls, the true sweat, Blake's intellectual dew, before I am resigned to slip a dusty finger on my lip."

"At his incipient sun the ice of twenty winters broke, crackling, in her eyes. Her mirroring, still mind, that held the world (made double) calm, went fluid, and it ran. There was a stir of music, mixed with flowers, in her blood; a swift impulsive balm from obscure roots; gold bees of clinging light swarmed in her brow. Her throat is full of songs, she hums, she is sensible of wings growing on her heart. She is a tree in spring trembling with the hope of leaves, of which the leaves are tongues."

"Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once. This I got from my understanding of Japanese gardens, that the way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it."

"Feeling is far more important [than reason] in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it?s all like erotic play."

"Forward my mail to Mars."

"I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred."

"I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day."

"I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like" eleemosynary" or "phantasmagoria" -- some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the... in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it."

"I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world."

"If the water were clear enough, if the water were still, but the water is not clear, the water is not still, you would see yourself, slipped out of your skin, nosing upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your belly's blood: Finned Ego, yard of muscle that coils, uncoils. If the knowledge were given you, but it is not given, for the membrane is clouded with self-deceptions and the iridescent image swims through a mirror that flows, you would surprise yourself in that other flesh heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool. Come. Bathe in these waters. Increase and die. If the power were granted you to break out of your cells, but the imagination fails and the doors of the senses close on the child within, you would dare to be changed, as you are changing now, into the shape you dread beyond the merely human. A dry fire eats you. Fat drips from your bones. The flutes of your gills discolor. You have become a ship for parasites. The great clock of your life is slowing down, and the small clocks run wild. For this you were born. You have cried to the wind and heard the wind's reply: "I did not choose the way, the way chose me." You have tasted the fire on your tongue till it is swollen black with a prophetic joy: "Burn with me! The only music is time, the only dance is love." If the heart were pure enough, but it is not pure, you would admit that nothing compels you any more, nothing at all abides, but nostalgia and desire, the two-way ladder between heaven and hell. On the threshold of the last mystery, at the brute absolute hour, you have looked into the eyes of your creature self, which are glazed with madness, and you say he is not broken but endures, limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever."

"In a sense, all creativity is a process of giving meaning to what is on a universal scale meaningless. The plant and the poet and the gardener collect these disparate, disorganized raindrops, sun rays, passing birds, and make something formal."

"Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees; this morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering, my late bloomers flushed with their brandy. A curious gladness shook me. So I have shut the doors of my house, so I have trudged downstairs to my cell, so I am sitting in semi-dark hunched over my desk with nothing for a view to tempt me but a bloated compost heap, steamy old stinkpile, under my window; and I pick my notebook up and I start to read aloud the still-wet words I scribbled on the blotted page: "Light splashed . . ." I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each day."

"In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn."

"Memory is each man's poet in residence."

"My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, that spring when I was waiting to be born. She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out."

"Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, I shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall refuse to let one startled swallow die, or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall."

"My name is Solomon Levi, the desert is my home, my mother's breast was thorny, and father I had none. The sands whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, be hard. I dance, for the joy of surviving, on the edge of the road."

"Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work."