…wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.
Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.
the lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story
In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can’t talk about leadership in its charismatic forms.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.
All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone – and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.
Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can’t be used for manipulation it’s why you never see good poetry in advertising.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It’s an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.