Great Throughts Treasury

"In times of darkness and direness, a good question can become a safety rope between you and your own sense of selfhood: A person who asks a question is not wholly undone by events. She is there to face them, to meet them. If you?re asking a question, you still believe in a future."

"Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels."

"Intelligence and receptivity are connected ? human meaning is made by seeing what is? The outer world can be transformed by a subjectively infused vision; inner event placed into the language of the physical takes on an equally mysterious addition."

"It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before."

"It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard."

"It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not. It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not. At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent?what could you say? Now it is almost over. Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life. It does this not in forgiveness? between you, there is nothing to forgive? but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation. Eating, too, is a thing now only for others. It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention. Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons."

"I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time."

"It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens."

"It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline."

"Justice lacking passion fails, betrays."

"Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains."

"Letting this wideness of being into ourselves, as readers or as writers, while staying close to the words themselves, we begin to find in poems a way of entering both language and being on their own terms. Poetry leads us into the self, but also away from it. Transparency is both capacious and focused. Free to turn inward and outward, free to remain still and wondering amid the mysteries of mind and world, we arrive, for a moment, at a kind of fullness that overspills into everything. One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read ? in such a moment, anything can happen. The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind?s knowledge. The lit and shadowed placed within us can be warmed."

"Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay."

"Making a poem is neither a wholly conscious activity nor an act of unconscious transcription ? it is a way for new thinking and feeling to come into existence, a way in which disparate modes of meaning and being may join. This is why the process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level."

"Life is short. But desire, desire is long."

"Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days."

"Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind."

"Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind."

"My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further."

"Narrative carries the knowledge of our alteration through the shifting currents of circumstance and time."

"Never surrender a good question for a mere answer."

"Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble."

"No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known. If it is the harvest of true concentration, it will know more than can be said in any other way. And because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one."

"Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love."

"One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen."

"One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world."

"Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation."

"Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough."

"One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling."

"One way poetry connects is across time? Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem."

"Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning, as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it."

"Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working."

"Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy."

"Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected."

"Perishable, It Said: perishable, it said on the plastic container, and below, in different ink, the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed. I found myself looking; now at the back of each hand, now inside the knees, now turning over each foot to look at the sole. Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants, then at the arguing jays. Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking. Coffee cups, olives, cheeses, hunger, sorrow, fears- these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when. How suddenly then the strange happiness took me, like a man with strong hands and strong mouth, inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings."

"Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence."

"Poems carry shimmer, multiplicity, undertow, mystery, kites of meaning and feeling so elusive they cannot be seen, yet they tauten the string that holds them."

"Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot."

"Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable."

"Poetry, and art in general, often counterbalance the main tenor of a culture. They carry different truths, as the Fool does in the court of a king. They puncture power and purpose?s narrowing of view. We lean towards the purposive and practical, not just as humans, but as mammals. Poetry reveals another set of values, which equally matter, and make life bearable in ways that it otherwise would not be. Kindness, astonishment, seeing the beauty in darkness and grief, seeing the darkness in beauty and joy, finding solace in the knowledge that you live a life others have also known. Utilitarianism alone is a cruel and strictured measure of a life."

"Poems? are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped?what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again, wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it."

"Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness."

"Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said."

"Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving."

"Poetry moves consciousness toward empathy."

"Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing."

"Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being."

"Shaped language is strangely immortal, living in a meadowy freshness outside of time."

"Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room."

"Silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing."