Tag Archives: Czeslaw Milosz

To Celebrate World Poetry Day – Praise and Wonder In Spite of Everything – Poems by Kaminsky and Milosz And a Kaminsky Interview Excerpt from March 15th, 2022

from The Separate Notesbooks: A Mirrored Gallery Pure beauty, benediction: you are all I gathered  From a life that was bitter and confused,  In which I learned about evil, my own and not my own.  Wonder kept seizing me, and I recall only wonder.  I asked, how many times, is this the truth of the […]

Czeslaw Milosz – A Tribute – Part Two – A Poem to Honour the Men and Women in Ukraine in Wartime, February 2022

Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of […]

A Tail of Two Poems – A Reflection on the Search for Eternal Truths in the Poetry of the Nobel Prize Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

5. Earth Again They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth. The lure of waters. The lure of fruits. Lure of two breasts and the long hair of a maiden. In rouge, in vermillion, in that color of ponds Found only in the Green Lakes near Wilno. An ungraspable multitudes swarm, come together In the […]

Poetry as Devotion, Prayer and Wholeness – The Poetry of Jennifer Grotz – And Quotes on Poetry by Rosemary Griebel and Juleta Seversen-Baker

  Poetry, in both its creation and the reading of it, insists on careful listening. Careful listening opens a space for the soul, for revelation, for wholeness. Poems are glimpses of wholeness. —Juleta Severson-Baker, Calgary-based poet and educator who teaches at the Calgary Arts Academy and Mount Royal University. Poetry matters because it is one […]

The Bigness of Small Poems – # 40 in a Series – The Gift of Czeslaw Milosz

Gift A day so happy Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers There was nothing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass […]

Singing in Dark Times – #6 in a Series – Good and Bad Times for Poetry

Joy. The other taste in sorrow’s cup Guy Gavriel Kay from The Last Light of the Sun, Penguin Canada, 2004 Motto* In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht(1898-1956): Poems 1913-1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, Eyre Methuen, 1976 *Brecht titled […]

Poetry of Remembrance – Rwanda, April 6th, 1994

Dedication You whom I could not save Listen to me. Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. What strengthened me, for you was lethal. You mixed up […]

An Alphabet of Poets – Z is for Zagajewski

Try to Praise the Mutilated World Try to praise the mutilated world Remember June’s long days And wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow The abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world – You watched the stylish yachts and ships; One of them had a long trip […]