Calming the Breath by Ko Un
Poised like an aging bear climbing a tree, hanging on tightly, I collect my breath. Poised like a bird stretching its neck out and pecking at food I collect my breath. Heaven and earth are…
Category: Poets
Share the Wealth with Te Martin: The Wisdom of Silence, Pilgrimage, and a Compost Pile– Reflections on Summer
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come,…
There’s Poetry and There’s Polemical Essays
Interviewer: Later this month you’ll be reading at the poetry festival, Split This Rock. Do you have an expectation for what you want the audience to take away from your reading? Alice Walker: A clearer…
Poetry Lover
I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive…
halfway around the world the bombs are falling
On the dedication page of her 2007 updated collection of Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima states: The REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS are dedicated to Bob Dylan; and to my grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, friend of the great anarchist…
Share the Wealth Sunday 19 April: How I Became a Poet by Maggie Needham
Hello all! In honor of National Poetry Month, I’d love to share with you the story of how I realized I was a poet and why I love spoken word so much. I’ll perform some…
Presence
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was the first person I ever met for whom I felt immediate and total trust. It was something which I had never expected to experience. Every sense, every brain cell and nerve…
Comfort and Consolation
What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it…
2015 Chinese Poets in Translation Reading Group
Chris Wallach and I are starting a reading group in 2015 with the aim of reading one of the translations each month of such poets as Wang Wei, Han-Shan, Li Ch’ing-chao, Tu Fu, Su Tung-p’o, Bo Juyi,…