Quote for Today: Mary Oliver

Roerich, Himalayas, 1933

The Old Poets Of China

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early

Image: Himalayas, 1933, Nicholas Roerich

Quote for Today: Billy Collins

Chair Seat Gloomy Treatment Interrogation

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Billy Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris

Public Domain Image via MaxPixel

Quote for Today: Walt Whitman


You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Public Domain Image via Pixabay

Quote for Today: Barbara Kingsolver


I do understand that they fall when I’m least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.
Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

Public Domain Image via Pixabay

Quote for Today: James Fenton



James Fenton

Public Domain Image via Pixabay