Category: Poets

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…

Accept Loss Forever

Bo Juyi, On Hearing Someone Sing a Poem by Yuan Zhen No new poems his brush will trace;Even his fame is dead.His old poems are deep in dustAt the bottom of boxes and cupboards.Once lately,…

Blessings of a Long Life

The world has allowed me to hand down a thousand of my poems; Heaven has let my years draw out to more than three score. I count over the happy chances that have helped me all my…

From Lea Goldberg’s Diary

The greatest and only crime: spiritual laziness. And within that spiritual laziness, one doesn’t even acknowledge it, making it seven times worse.  –Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing

Russians Reciting Poetry as Prayer

Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away.  Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…