Poetry is a superior amusement: I do not mean an amusement for superior people. I call it an amusement, an amusement pour distraire les honnêtes gens, not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more false. If we think of the nature of amusement, then poetry is not amusing; but if we think of anything else that poetry may seem to be, we are led into far greater difficulties.

-T.S. Eliot
[quoted]

Crying Angel

Nothing prepared me for heaven.
Its scaffolds -- street after street --
halls leading to halls,
rooms papered with distance

as if heaven were only perspective,
a vanishing point drawing us
until we vanished. And if
I am crying, it's for small things:

staplers, bowls, gloves, spoons
on their pedestals, their ideal forms
lost at the ends of corridors --
for Music in its winged box,

Math's fulcrum and see-saw,
Geography's colored pins, its there, there.

How did we ever come to think
the single world was precious,
the model for us to love --
one town, one house, one sky,

one woman, the mole on her back --
when it is the universe, its gaps,
the mileage between its outposts,
God loves and is his image?

They weren't lies after all, the stories
where we are transmuted into stars
or into water lost in the infinity
of itself. Who could have imagined

God's need for distance,
his hurling us away to be near him?

-Keith Ratzlaff

The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about.

-Kay Ryan

   even if your preferred mode is fragment,

      you need syntax

   to love.

   Still, there is a "leaking" when we try to

   put things together.

   As a bowl starts out being a bowl, the not-

      bowlness

   drains out of it. Later,

   form is not something we remember

      doing, like being born.


-Brenda Hillman, quoted by Mark Doty at AWP 2009

Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus...

I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.

-Kay Ryan, 'I Go to AWP,' and you should have too!

The Annihilation of Nothing

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,
More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,
Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks - images burst with fire
Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided
Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.
Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

-Thom Gunn

Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.

-Michael Brooks, in 'Born Believer: How Your Brain Creates God'
[via morethan95theses]

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

[via 3quarks]

Tumblr must be Latin for "I don't have to tell you where I found this". As Woodsy Owl would say: give a shit, via it.

-jkottke

Awesome thing about Twitter #1,729: No one asks you to post twenty-five random boring facts about yourself.

-ayjay

Those To Come

Eyeless in the morning sun you were
pale and mild, a modern girl
taken with thought, still prone to care
makin tea in your underwear
you went out in the yard to find

something to eat and clear your mind
something bad inside me went away

quaking leaves and broken light
shifting skin the coming night
the bearers of all good things arrive
climb inside us, twist and cry
a kiss on your molten eyes

myriad lives like blades of grass
yet to be realized, bow as they pass

they are cold,
still,
waiting in the ether,
to form,
feel,
kill,
propagate,
only to die
(x2)

dissolve
magically,
absurdly,
they'll end,
leave,
dissipate,
coldly
and strangely
return

-The Shins

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

-Richard Wilbur, in 'Lying'