Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting
Poetry I read to lighten my mind and enlighten my heart.
Poetry I read to sweeten my bitter mind.
Poetry I read to replace my heart’s sorrows with my soul’s ecstasy.
Poetry I read to transform my human mind-jungle into my divine heart-garden.”
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric;
out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry
is a true poet, though he has never written a line
in all his life.
Poetry, A Natural Thing
by Robert Duncan
>Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. "They came up
just like they do every year
on the rocks."
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
This beauty is an inner persistence
toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
from which the youngest world might spring,
salmon not in the well where the
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
blindly making it.
This is one picture apt for the mind.
A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extravagant antlers
lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
"a little heavy, a little contrived",
his only beauty, to be