The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

a 1. I drink coffee every morning
b 2. while teachers in the south, east, and north
c 3. rise, listening with held breath
d 4. to a rhythm to which they will follow
a 5. our future into allowing
b 6. chosen students, blessed, permitted to go forth
c 7. to determine our fate like a Seth,
d 8. bearing fruit we are forced to swallow.
a 9. Peaceful coffee, too rich for mourning,
b 10. traffic passes our house driving toward
c 11. a place I'll pass like an exile abandoning my quest.
d 12. Turning, turning like a dervish skirt's bravado
c 13. chiseling out my worshipers niche with my best
d 14. hand, lying in hot dirt, closing my eyes to learned sorrow.

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know -

I love your voice,
your smile,
your lower lip,
so **** when it's thinking
just relaxing waiting to
pounce in daredevil
spontaneous.

I love your skin
the color it turns
after sunning, reddish
burn, like your hair,
your beard.

I love how you tolerate me
the devil, the nag, the sad
doll, unhappy, discontent,
searching, demanding.

I love being with you and
being the one who gets to
touch your strong arms,
flexing with work, always cut,
how do you get that way
with no fitness?

You are July, you are
what the summer was
waiting for.

How lucky I am,
to spend my days
near you, coming home
to you, curling next to you,
you let me kiss you, these
are treasures I will carry
all my life.

blossoms like cad fish lingering
beneath salten seas lost
yellowing days
desperate for remembrance.

creeping thyme crevicing
through sandstone
jumping gardens of
mist spray.

broken teeth alongside
coffee and news
old printed cities
chilled by traffic noise.

I.

This is a poet of the river lands,
a lowdown man of the deepest
depth of the valley, where gravity gathers
the waters, the poisons, the trash,
where light comes late and leaves early.

From the window of his small room
the lowdown poet looks out. He watches
the river for ripples, flashes, signs
of beings rising in the undersurface dark,
or lightly swimming upon the flow,
or, for a minnow, descending the deeps
of the air to enter and shatter
forever their momentary reflections,
for the river is a place passing
through a passing place.

The poet, his window, and his poems
are creatures of the shore that the river
gnaws, dissolves, and carries away.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted
in the dark, aspiring to the light,
dependent on both. His poems
are leavings, sheddings, gathered
from the light, as it has come,
and offered to the dark, which he believes
must shine with sight,
with light, dark only to him.


II.

Times will come as they must,
by necessity or his wish, when he leaves
his enclosure and his window,
his homescape of house and garden,
barn and pasture, the incarnate life
of his desire, thought, and daily work.
His grazing animals look up
to watch in silence as he departs.
He sets out at times without even
a path or any guidance other than knowledge
of the place and himself as they were
in time already past. He goes among trees,
climbing again the one hill of his life.
With his hand full of words he goes
into the wordless, wording it barely
in time as he passes. One by one he places
words, balancing on each
as on a small stone in the swift flow
in his anxious patience until
the next arrives, until he has come
at last again into presentiment
of the Real, the wholly real in its grand
composure, for which as before
he knows no word. And here again
he must stop. Here by luck or grace he may
find rest, which he has been seeking
all along. Sometimes by the time’s flaws
and his own, he fails. And then
by luck or grace he will be given
another day to try again, to go maybe
yet farther before again he must stop.
He is a gatherer of fragments, a cobbler
of pieces. Piece by piece he tells
a story without end, for in the time
of this world no end can come.
It is the story of eternity’s shining,
much shadowed, much put off,
in time. And time, however long, falls short.







Wendell Berry's most recent books include It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, New Collected Poems, and A Place in Time, the newest volume in his Port William series.

The patterns
of rainfall and afforestation,
the veins of village streams—
I colored them in
as I saw fit.

My beloved spiders
wove a second pattern
on top,
which I approved
before leaving.





Günter Eich (1907–1972) was a noted German poet and radio dramatist who won the Georg Büchner Preis in 1959. His translator, Michael Hofmann, is a poet and German translator; his versions of Eich will be out soon in book form in Angina Days: Selected Poems of Günter Eich (Princeton).

vaguen
(Samuel Beckett, notation on MS of Happy Days)


I
Fire comes bouncing in from the
desert a threat to houses Here’s
what we do says the King to
Rudyard Kipling who is visiting
Stuff wet rags in the eaves throw
the silverware in the swimming
pool And my letters Rudyard
Kipling is thinking will you be
pressing my letters to your
breast as we skid towards
the car Truly diverse people
the King and Kipling one or
the other was always getting
his feelings hurt Above them
a strip of once blue sky now
dark adust


II
Nowadays there are technicians
of despair you can work at it
Going to the Buddhist study
group I pass a thin crumpled
man at a wall his face on the
bricks Behind him another big
black city legs wide apart roaring
Say you aren’t stupid then why
aren’t you happy


III
New guy at the Buddhist study
group Eyes cut to bits I want
he keeps saying So I don’t get
so he keeps saying A bunch
of sage grass has blown onto
his head and grown down into
his mind He shakes hands with
everyone over and over again
at the door


IV
I had previously been to
the Old South Thirty minutes
into the faculty dinner a man
to my left drops his eyes and
his voice says he murdered his
brother with a shotgun when
he was twelve The other diners
appear to have heard this
before On the plane home I
sit across from a vet with a
falcon on his lap It observes
the other passengers severely
Drinks apple juice from a
cup with very small silver
lips


V
At twenty-eight thousand feet
above the uncarved block of
NY state a cricket jumps onto
my coat Vaguen it says






Anne Carson currently teaches at NYU and will publish a handmade book called NOX in 2010. She is the author of Autobiography of Red, Plainwater, and other books of poetry, non-fiction, and mixed genre.

holding a tragedy lie between
nervous hands glancing as
my eastern sun bombards
this sierra western *****
plummeting veins solar
caging my fragile wrap
boiling my lungs while I
cradle a tragedy lie.

ten years ago I was thin.
I remember the lover I
met ten years before then.
ten years later was nowhere
to be seen. Five years later
had yet to happen. I can
remember the freezing winter
of 1996.  It was just like yester
day.  I miss the creamy cotton
futon tucked quietly in my private
curtained alcove entryway, all sheets
calmly milky, my studio littered
by inspiration found outside along
Warwick Street. Life was easy,
I'd only loved one man for real. He'd
loved me just enough to leave
me in tact. Ten years later from
ten years from that, I've been left
twice, and left with one who stays.
All the while wanting the man
meant for God and an angel.

shadows of people I've known before
I see you all again
here upon this blanken sheet
carving upon words
with tipp-ed hats
I've seen you before
I'll see you again
it is SO good to see you!

I'm glad we've met in this version here
you are that much nicer now!

When daylight fades
and all my visions forget
my heart's murderous rampage;

when age descends
upon my thoughts
until all life of memory is gone;

when time resists my begging cry
to live one more day to love him more;

when all my dreams rebel
against my pang of desire
for wants not found or given.

His eyes, his smile,
his golden curl around his brow.

A stolen photo, a stolen phrase,
held close for now.

When to forget? When to give up?
When she embraces him.

And even then, yes, even then,
I will still carry on.

Blighted Doom shone her ugliness 'til men wept without repair.
Cowered and broken by such disaster,
Fight upon fight with no survivor,
A tune shy of harmony and of pace,
The men simply shattered.

Thus satisfied by what she'd born,
Doom stole past the dawn, flying on into ladies' dreams,
only to be warned.

"Tread not here, promiscuous Doom, we've blood in our mouths for you."

Spitting violence towards Doom's way, the women laughed in tune.  
Surrounding her in a ringed rosie,
prodding her on with a jealous melody,
pinching her nose and stripping her bare,
chasing her breathless until...

Around she turned, that mischievous Doom, fleeing her same way,
while coyly the sisters winked to her and locked elbows in victory.  

Then...the ladies entered the gentlemen's room daintily filling the ear
with hushes and cooing and kisses so fine,
the men's spirits were verily soothed.
So on to on and on and on to on and on they lived on.

The snow leopard mother runs straight
down the mountain.
Elk cliff. Blizzard.
Hammers keening
into the night.
Her silence and wild
falling is a compass
of hunger and memory. Breath
prints on the carried-away body.
This is how it goes so far away
from our ripening grapes and lime,
coyote eyes ******* the canyon.
Yet
we paddle out in our ice boat
headed toward no future at last.
O tired song of what we thought,
stillness crouches like a prow.
We break the ice gently forward.
If I want to cling to anything
then this quiet of being the last
to know about our lives.

Copyright @ 2014 by Jennifer K. Sweeney. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on June 27, 2014.

Happy Valentine's Day to a Man I Will Always Love but Can Never Have:
I Still Love You Anyway!!!!


I think about you ever day
in every kind of way
your laughing eyes
your sensuous voice, deep, melodic, faithful

**** the girl who walks beside you
I wish it were me, but that will never be.

I won't stalk you,
I'll just obsess over you
in secret.
Writing poems about you
forever to people who
will never know you or know me.

In my heart you are always a valentine.

Mom...
I've wanted to tell you,
it hurt me when you threw me out.
I needed help
and
you turned your back on me and called the cops.  

That ******.

You were my mom.
I think about that on this day and wish I could forgive you.
I can't.
Happy Mother's Day.

Happy Father's Day

Dad, I know you were never there for me
for the past 18 years
and that hurt like hell.

Thinking of you always.
Happy Father's Day.

Prayer tonight, I'm happy today
I have a wicker table
with two unmatching wicker chairs.

I bought a wonderful woven turquoise place mat
for my cats so they won't be quite as messy.
I bought my boyfriend a cheap wicker Fedora.

My son spoke with another Jew
and met someone from my people.

Today was blessedly hot, thank God!
I only worked a little.

Tonight is quiet, and my family is close,
My prayer tonight is happy,
So be it.

housed in the corner
i never see it change position,
its sensitivity to climate,
nuances of atmosphere,
as though i lived among subtle genius.
assuring the appropriateness of sleevelessness,
i recognize devotion.

This is where your life begins
on a trip across a narrow channel
to an island outpost where twelve
students wait for class to start.

Our days are new, just building
our towers to support many children,
fantasy race cars, sojourns in war zones
so we can snap monumental geographic moments
of hidden earthly marvels where the sun blazes
against hot red rocks and we show how strange
and otherworldly our home can be.  
Our days are new...

Hope arrives in bulk and all we create
in our imaginations is available for us to believe in.
God still smiles upon us, it is before we turn our back on him.
Our mothers, fathers, teachers, friends root for us to win...

Every door we open becomes an adventure where
the unknown and impossible might come true.
We can become movie stars if we walk into the right cafe
on the right day in LA.
Now is when anything can happen.  

We still have a chance to mingle with learned scholars
who continue to seek out the beginning of their lives.  
If we are lucky, a conversation might bear fruit,
feeding us with treasures of study these schooled giants have uncovered
giving us material to put in our books, sending us on a path
through time reading other men's minds.  

Our days still are fresh, we wake like young peach roses,
wrapped naked in crisp sheets, our first apartment littered
with wine, sketches, and our lover...after we return from the island.

Smoldering with lustful ambition, refining our looks,
this is where our life begins.

beyond the measure of any cure
sits my pleasure of sought after
dreams delighting in roaming with your
grace filled presence in city adventure
or sat at a table shedding quiet tears of adoration from afar.

bakers dozen  
on the horizon near the playa
where apocalyptic marauders skate,
following a verde raw fruit shake,
beneath fade red chakra shawls  
billowing from the desert winds.

a touch of gypsy, an ounce of saint
distant, unattainable, supremely created beings.

dusty weathered skins, they survive on magic,
gifted to them
alone.

too fast
I  ran to the
sun as I hurdled the
pits dug for young ladies too small
to dare.

till death
will find me still
wanting your surrender
wanting you to want me to lay
with you.

Ocean
bluing beneath
my hands brushing over
warm Caribbean bathing salts
at dusk.

nightfall
becomes my shroud
to hide my hunger for
impossible fruit growing far
away.

Tender
hearts on tiny
thoughts leaving for other
circles of people, searching
for love.

feeling...
it seems like I
will never be rid of
my feelings for you even if
I should.

It was Sunday and she rushed around looking for her hair straightening iron and a pair of shoes she knew she'd worn just yesterday.  The day was as sunny as a Sunday could be, June 5th, dry as a desert in her Sierra Nevada town, no rain in sight until October at least, no smell of smoke, no fires in the air, it was a perfect summer day.  Rushing around her quiet, just waking up cottage, she lifted up clothes piled on her over stuffed fireside chairs, riffling through the pile of clothes dropped to the floor of her shower room, hunting, hunting, wracking her brain, walking backwards through time in her mind to find "where oh where" had she left her shoes!!!

A glimpse of something black caught her eye from inside a canvas shoulder bag, "AH!"  She'd changed out of my work clothes before she'd gone to the river!  There were her shoes, waiting for her patiently to find them in her carry bag.

Shoes found, she raced to straighten her curls flat and sleek, straightened her teeshirt and pulled down her skirt a little so it sat just on her hips and down from her waist, allowing her newly grown Buddha belly freedom to breath.  She knew the flea market would be on all day, but there was something special about making it a whole day event.  If she were the first one there, it was like she were one of the vendors. She would be able to feel the bustle of the potential of setting up shop, selling found treasures and wares, collecting dollars from strangers, meeting new people, and possibly stumbling into the most amazing opportunity of your life.  She would be a witness, as the sun shed it's first glimmerings of light and long shadows down over the market, to the twinkling, the eye winking of the sun as it released it's magic over the lot.  That moment of the morning when the unknown was let down from the heavens and all of life's coincidences, synchronicities, and connections were released for us to walk through and make the most of in order to change our lives.  She fluffed the last brush of blush over her cheek, glossed her lips, gave a little tousle to mess up her now straight hair and was ready.  She grabbed her purse, car keys, and a burlap shopping tote, her phone, a cup of coffee, and a book...just in case she wanted to sit in the midst of the market and enjoy the ambiance while she soaked up some wisdom.  Then...she walked out the door.

I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

The last place for a waterfall, no mountains or valleys,
horizons flat as summer seas, then from thirty miles,
a white tower of spray punctures the blue sky.

Closer, you hear thunder, though there is no storm,
see double rainbows, bright bridges across air,
feel a welcome drizzle in searing, blistering heat.

Closer, you part a bush, stand on the edge of a chasm;
the wide Zambesi glides forward, then plunges deep
into a wound in the earth’s crust, a break in basalt.

The ground trembles with shock, you shout but hear
nothing except a raging roar as solid water
explodes up in your face, blinds you, engulfs you.

Down in the Devil’s Cataract, the river cuts frantic
zigzags through deep gorges until it pours into a pool
where a dead hippo bounces up like a rubber ball.



[Mosi-oa-Tunya: the Victoria Falls, translated as "Smoke that Thunders"]

In the shadow of the volcano,
fresh from the dark sands of Siberia,
the brown steppe eagle circles and waits,
watching for weakness, searching
for carrion, leg feathers bristling,
shoulders hunched like a hunting wolf.

Exultant, it swoops down
on a yellow wagtail,
barks like a crow as it revels
in the taste of blood. I see
the bright buttery feathers
sticking to its wet tongue.

what matters more than
hot springs bubbling over
boulders fallen before men wanted
to sit among-st the steam?

details.

Empty rooms angry with patience
broken planks of olden wood flooring
wet with cat **** and rain.

This house held hope
until the town voted it
down. Ruined, useful only to
corrupt our stainless American children.

Where can I find our majesty in
the streets and towns of this country?!
The young hate the old. They laugh at us while we die.
By  the time we finally muster our gumption to live
they chase us from our homes by stealing our jobs and
not caring who they hurt.

young. take your time to wonder what you are doing.

winter winds blow fast
through desperate alleyways
chapping lips bright red.

nature mattered once.
Oak leaves rotting in autumn rain.

nothing to say with nothing to do
on a day when all that i've heard
reminds me of lies told to me in my youth.

Rocks fall into our laps without
tearing one thread of our lives or futures,
money will fall and grow from trees

Men love larger women and thin ladies
struggle more than we are told.

Beauty is more than skin deep and different than in the eyes of the beholders,
although beauty has no consistency and anything can be beautiful.

Risks and amazing lives wait for us all, waiting for us to open the door, call our agent,
answer a casting call, play our drums.

Do anything you like, it will be the right turn,
all I've heard today were echos of lies.

Tonight I wander through yellowing pines
through days of autumn while I
am twenty nine dancing drunk on northern Cali
wine, cold, wet, between an angry coast and
the moss on ancient tree groves.

Dancing like a Dervish in my crinkled cotton
gauze skirt tickling at my naked ankles and
washing my dirt covered feet.  

Hair wet from misty air, curling and dripping
he stares at me, mesmerized by some magic
that does not exist. It is only me 'neath the moon.

He wants to be in love with a freedom that has no
place near me.  I mean entrapment, commitment,
ownership, caged.  

If he holds me, I'll want him there forever and ever,
that will never change.  He should not want to leave if
he walks through my door.  Keep walking if you're only going to
walk out.

He does, he smiles, laughs, drinks, then, as I'm turning
one more spiral, he falls into the dark and walks on
to a woman who will let him love her for only a
fraction of a lifetime.

Our front porch is covered in chairs
waiting for visitors
We offer you hot tea or cold
Yoga at ten
and prayer flags if you need.

Far Away there are Yogis standing in
Mountain Pose...
Where is my peace guru?

My path is riddled without a person
holding my hand or
offering me an invitation
to pray the way I want to pray.

I can only imagine the room
hot and charged with mantras
and faith where followers
devote their hours to adherence.  

There lives are busy
moments of honesty,
contentment,
fervent compassion,
sweat, and balance.

Here we sit drinking,
waiting in our chairs,
while our posture
is a hope rather than
a deed.

Sigh for relief it is a day of mine,
I have work, I have coffee,
I have a week to live through.

where arrrrrrre you in all your world?
tonight i wonder if you remember what
i have falllen for you

drunk into deeper wishes for your love
Jesus,  with him it
matters.

dreams and dreamers we all
live,
she is in your reach
i wish you would grab her
or grab me
which ever you wish.

One woman said
Clean yourself up
with a cocktail napkin, so here I am
in the bathroom.
Sounds of the party.
Sounds of one man
pretending he gets the joke.
Oh, he gets the joke.
He just didn’t think
it was very funny.
I can understand that man.
The bones of Tom’s hands
made a fist
and told my nose
a joke, which is to say he
hit me. The resulting laughter
was quiet, but
well-sustained. People decorate
their bathrooms
like I would rather be at the beach
than in this bathroom.
I’d rather be watching swans
mate for life. Well,
not actually mating.
Okay, actually mating;
you can hardly tell
what’s going on. Unlike
*******, or unlike
a wedding ceremony. Or, no.
The wedding ceremony is more
like swans. I thought
I was just watching two people
hold hands
in front of a candle.
The people deciding
to wear flowers in the winter,
disrespectful of what the world,
bigger than us, said we could wear
or eat, like the asparagus hoers d’oeuvres
insisted it was a good time
to feel like it was summer.
At the wedding I was quiet.
At the party I was quiet
until Tom found me
offensive. The homeowners
long ago had decided
I’d rather be somewhere golden
than in this bathroom.
Outside the sounds
of people making promises,
or rather, hushing a room
to condone the most public
of promises made
in front of a candle.
When I’m cleaned up
I’ll find, if he was invited,
the man who played the *****,
or the priest who wears soft shoes
so he doesn’t disturb the holy
spirits resting in the rafters
when he walks through
the resting cathedral,
stooping at times
to pick up flowers.

By Hannah Gamble

We sip sap as
wood pecker
would dream

of the rhythm of the

beak in bark.

Hey, eucalypt eyes.
Hello, belly birch.

Oh my moss.

By Rose Linke

Is obviously unsolved to this day.
Is a heavy blizzard subject to drought.
Is a crater in the ground launched into space.
Is the lowliest temperature in a dance hall fire.
Is said to help stem the spread of ceasing to exist.

Critics call it the finest film ever made.

by Rose Linke

The war was everywhere,
          not just in the desert      
          where we expected it to be.          
One night I heard the war in the wall
          behind my head—
          an animal with thick skin-wings
beating another toothy beast,
         claws hitting fur, wood, flesh.
         I asked my neighbor later
what it had been like to be alive
         before a time of war,
         and he said it was funny we even
have a word for it, because
         everything that’s alive
         stays that way by tearing
heat from another’s belly.

by Hannah Gamble

Autumn crept in without word or a doubt.
It slept all summer, or so they all thought.
Really it traveled round trees and plains,
To find it’s real home among the oak laden trails.

Never did it speak only scent told its tale.
Cool acorns and apples growing fast for the cold spells.

Slow seems fast when a chill rolls by                                                      
during a late summer swim on the river rock slide.                                  
The children looked round, then heard a school bell.                        
They knew the call flying through the pine trees as they screamed,
“Hurry, Hurry, only one more time!”

Round the death and dying came,
the end of young summer into a lady.  
The end of girls and boys for all.  
Into proper gentle children
dressed in sweaters and tightly rung curls.  

August 10, 2011

When pain upon pain
becomes the rhythm of the season,
the day of healing falls short of now.
When beauty in Jah becomes a greedy boat,
then my bitter white dress
I will pull up to above my ankles and excuse myself.  

Dancers jumpin’, rollin’ their thunder,
dippin’ their hips till the men start to rumble,
dancer woman watch that young girl toil;
gather in your jealous heart old woman,
she’s here to work.  

Make room old ladies, our daughters are a comin’,
you’re youth goes in the locker room;
your privies go in a flower box.  

October 16, 2010

Flowers bloom yearly
then die. We make beds
for beauty, sheeting them
to make love.  Lovers coil
wrapping skin, sweating to
make a future enshrined with
devotions to their own.
Damp ground tread on by
feet running to demand what
they want for themselves. Running
over flowers pinking towards the sun;
wild, growing without struggle, until
they are trampled.

Jan. 26, 2009

I’ll write you a hello, an uncomplicated hello.  
If you want to read, and don’t know how,
I will write you a hello.

If you want to work and don’t know how,
I will write you a hello.  

You can do what you want to do,
if you work at it long enough.  
I will write you a hello.
Keep going.  


June 15, 2008

To touch and tumble through thick of night
'Till they lay wasted on a Sacramento street 'till light,
Boys in brown dancing in the sky,
'Till boys no more ruled their lives.

'Till boys no more carved a bed,
Under a burnout too drenched to mend.
A thought for mine what shall I repair
On this dancing place we call our share.

'Till girls in sashes and shawls and bathing suits
One hundred years old with knowledge to boot
Of business and law, life and success,
Thousands of generations put to the test.

They win, They win, as they dance through the sun.
Dancing and singing, dancing and singing.  

June 26, 2008

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 02, 2005

I am quiet, walking between the rows of shoulder high...
there is learning catching up to me, racing towards my heels.
its pace crushes my lungs;
My head hangs, the earth's aroma lifts towards me so I can smell.

Huffing with the strength of an intelligent woman,
My ******* are firm,
my brawny hair ringlets down my sides,
my solitude attracts attention for one moment,
then the love moves on.

the cold freezes my breath.

I sit at a desk,
conjuring up their names without permission.
invading their lives like an uninvited transient.
watching through an open curtain as they make love to other women.
discarding my own life, calm, slow, sleeping,
fighting for nothing.


October 2, 2005