Outward Bound Ideas

Ideas from Bookgleaner@gmail.com - Also: http://Inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com - http://Onwardboundhumor.blogspot.com - http://Homewardboundphotos.blogspot.com - And http://davidthemaker.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

86. Thank Youse IV

Thank you Peter Finch
"To live in Wales,
Is to be mumbled at
by re-incarnations of Dylan Thomas
in numerous diverse disguises."

Thank you Philip Appleman
"There's time yet to get it––not right,
of course, but anyway revised,
emended, more mature
in its lumpy way. Think of it,
two billion years of shaping:
it's a beginning."

Thank you R. S. Thomas
".... It
was the colour of the moonlight
on snow and as quiet
as moonlight, but breathing
as you can imagine that
God breaths within the confines
of our definition of him, agonizing
over immensities that will not return."

Thank you Rachel Hadas
"This walking arm in arm in harmony
having come from separate directions––
this is a marriage too. It looks so easy
and is perhaps so easy and is not.
It always is a gift.
It gives a form to life
perhaps invisibly."

Thank you Rainer Maria Rilke
"As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges."

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

85. Texts & Pretexts - Aldous Huxley

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials––in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.
....
That good poets should sometimes, or even generally, write badly is not, after all, very surprising. Auspicious circumstances must conspire with exceptional gifts; the mind must be seconded by its incalculable companion of flesh and blood, not crossed and hindered. The surprising thing, I repeat, is not that good poets should sometimes write badly; it is, rather that they should publish these unfortunate essays; that they should not have been self-critical enough to consign them to their proper place, the waste-paper basket.