God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oilCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?Generations…
Category: Poets
A Poet’s Life
Yankev Glatshteyn worked in over fifty sweatshops. –Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn
Today’s One-Liner (#80)
All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses. –Wisława Szymborską, Nobel Lecture
Maniacal Obstinacy
I often wonder whether I have in me a single gene or drop off blood inherited from my biblical ancestors, or even from the ghettos of the old Spanish and German cities. Who knows, perhaps…
Today’s One-Liner (#23)
Commonplace miracle: that so many commonplace miracles happen. –Wislawa Szymborska, “Miracle Fair”
Containing Multitudes
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 53 [Soen Nakagawa] had many faces: he was a simple monk, a “crazy wisdom” Zen master,…
Honesty & Humility
There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Present Minute, Only Minute
My grandmother in her old age Sold barley and groats at a stall In the market place. She did not measure her cereal More carefully Than I must minutes. — The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff:…
Camerados
I swore an oath of eternal brotherhood with Yuan-ruo, and pledged him my everlasting allegiance, as an expression of my lifelong loyalty to him. Chinese people have always treated their friends with this sort of…