December 30, 2018 – 11:42 pm
Archaic Torso of Apollo We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile […]
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December 18, 2018 – 7:38 pm
The Triumph of Love from CXLVIII So – Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem – I ask you what are poems for? They are to console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch. Let us commit that to our dust. What ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad and angry consolation. What is the […]
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February 8, 2017 – 8:56 pm
Epigraph from Motto In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976 This gorgeous, difficult, heart-breaking world. What do we poets do with it? Brecht says we must sing about it. His […]
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What does refusal look like? Refusal to look at our shadow side, our rejected aspects, good and bad; and/or refusal to live on the borderlands of our lives, and past them, into our greatest fullness? American poet Robert Bly (1926 – ) symbolizes this or these refusals, strikingly in this poem: And the toe of […]
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January 31, 2016 – 6:13 pm
from Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, # 29 Let This Darkness Be Your Bell Tower Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth […]
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December 4, 2014 – 7:43 pm
from The Ninth Duino Elegy Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute), but a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just to utter: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit […]
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As I was searching for a document in my computer files recently I came across something I written to a friend a few years ago. It echoes some of what I tried to write in my recent blog on sorrow: Grief Struck Remedies. But even better it took me back to the poetry of the […]
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In January 2007 I was preparing to lead my first Recovering Words poetry writing workshop at The Orchard, a drug and alcohol recovery centre on Bowen Island, offshore West Vancouver. I was looking for poems on addiction from an addict’s point of view. I had found a chilling one called Half-Hearted Moon from the section […]
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December 28, 2011 – 9:09 am
What a great adventure I had for almost 5 months from August to December 2011 when I took Peggy Rosenthal’s on-line course sponsored by Image journal – Poetry as a Spiritual Practice. Here below is my response to her assignment Poems of Loss, Absence, Darkness, and Doubt. The Chandelier Now, I see you. Now I don’t. […]
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