No one could say the stories were useless for as the tongue clacked five or forty fingers stitched corn was grated from the husk pathwork was pieced or the darning was done... (from 'The Storyteller Poems')
Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?
What god will catch me when I'm down, when I've taken sufficient drink to reveal myself, when my words are little more than a blurring of consonant and vowel?
Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly a waste of everyone's time, Jonathan couldn't help but be surprised that coffee hadn't been thus immortalized.
I think maybe today a poem I hope after breakfast I start trying pulling it out of my own gut mostly by force
I felt the threads of connection between us—fragile filaments, so easily snapped. Like the poem at shift into his side, we were craving to fit inside the other, and is melting and reshaping could be deeper, more resilient.
I'm sorry," Billy says, "but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.
Poverty of young men alone behind the stairways, who practice alchemy inside bottle caps, who know the altruism of a last syringe.
I'd rather be not the light in your life The bright day might make me obscure I'd rather be the cold darkness For it remains, unseen, uncertain and unsure
For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands
I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky.
No matter how you were taught by your teacher about how to recite a poem, it is impossible to wear your teacher's smiling face to the stage. You got to put on that smile.
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
The BALLPOINT PENGUINS, black and white, Do little else but write and write. Although they've nothing much to say, They write and write it anyway....
Long have I dwelt forgotten here In pining woe and dull despair; This place of solitude and gloom Must be my dungeon and my tomb.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall
You will not know all about the fire simply because you asked. When she speaks of the forest this is what she is teaching you, you who thought you were her master.
I did a short film at Outfest, 'Where Are the Dolls,' based on an Elizabeth Bishop poem done, where I play this woman who is sort of walking the streets and ends up alone dancing in a club. I have this hot and heavy scene with a very beautiful actres...
With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so...
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.