Tag Archives: Rainer Maria Rilke

In Honour of the 92nd Anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Death Yesterday Three Marvellous Rilkean Knockoffs by Vuong, Oliver and Hayes

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 […]

Priest and Poet – Andy Parker – 1957-2018

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 […]

Singing in Dark Times – # 3 in a Series – What Do Poets Do? We Praise

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 […]

The Cost of Refusal – A Poem by Robert Bly (and another by Rilke)

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 […]

Dreadfulness and Bliss – The Genius of Rainer Maria Rilke

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 […]

Paying Attention – Rilke and Hirschfield

    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 […]

We Squander Our Sorrows

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 […]

And There Is No More – But Lots More of Poet, Christopher Locke

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. […]

Poetry As A Spiritual Practice – Shadowed By Fear

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 […]