Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (7)

from Charles Sangster

Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
The full light rarely finds us.

from Matthew Arnold

The grand power of poetry is its interpretive power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.

from Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The war brought to some of us, besides its direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days.

from Walter Pater

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original.

from Emily Dickinson

Mr. Higginson,--are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

from Paul Verlaine

The tune is everything--
     so prefer the the irregular
          line that dissolves in the air,
to the stodginess of "meaning."

from Gerard Manley Hopkins

What you look at seems to look hard at you.

from William Butler Yeats

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from opinions caught up in casual irritation or momentary phantasy.

from Robert Frost

I slumbered with your poems on my breast.

from Rainer Maria Rilke

Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments.

I'm going to talk about food today. It is always a notable shift for me--these dark evenings of the waning year, when I begin to forsake the garden for preserved food. I have harvested the last of my brussels sprouts and nearly all of my kale; already I have made a sizable dent in my prideful display of canned tomatoes, and I'm back to buying grocery store lettuce. Still, the freezer and the cupboard are not bare yet, and I've made a couple of meals recently that remind me that stored or preserved foodstuffs do not imply any lessening of quality. To wit:

December Risotto

Broth base: 1 quart clam liquor (left over from a summer steamer feast, then strained and frozen) thawed and heated along with 3 cups of plain water to reduce the saltiness

Minced and then sauteed together: 1 small onion (from the grocery store because my onion crop was a big failure), a small handful of wild honey mushrooms (picked in October, dried over the wood stove, then soaked in warm water for half an hour, rinsed, and squeezed dry), a tablespoon of red pepper flakes (from my own hot peppers strung up to dry in the kitchen and then scissored into the pan), 3 tablespoons of olive oil (you'll be surprised to hear this, but for some reason I can't seem to grow olives in Maine).

Add 2 cups of white arborio rice, stirring until the grains are thoroughly oiled.

Slowly, over the course of 20 minutes or so, ladle in the broth, stirring more or less constantly as the rice absorbs the liquid, although it's fine to take breaks to replenish your wine glass or to turn the page of the Dickens novel you're reading while you're standing at the stove.

When the rice has absorbed all the liquid and is no longer crunchy, stir in a pat of butter and a spoonful of minced parsley (which several months ago I emulsified in the food processor with a touch of bland oil, which helps the leaves keep their color, then froze in small containers and now thaw as needed). Finally, stir in a half-cup of grated good-quality parmesan (purchased along with the aforementioned wine at Miccucci's Grocery in Portland, Maine, during a foray into civilization).

Set the table, light the little angel chime candles, and serve with a salad: organic baby arugula from the grocery store combined with split brussels sprouts quickly pan-roasted with olive oil and garlic from the stash under the sink (fortunately my garlic plants thrived, unlike those stupid onions); add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a soupcon of salt and pepper, and you're done.

For two or three people, this lovely simple supper does not require any other additions: there's plenty of rice available for seconds. That's not say that a warm baguette wouldn't be nice too, if you had one.

If you do end up with leftovers, heat some peanut or grapeseed oil in a skillet, form the risotto into patties, and fry them up. Tom eats these for breakfast. They also make a good layer under the next day's sauced chicken thighs or marinated pork chops.

Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (5)

from Thomas Carlyle
Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him.

from Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
And honour us with truth, if not with praise.

from Edgar Allan Poe
A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring effect.

from Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov
I am not Byron--yet I am
One fore-elected, yet one more
Unknown, world-hunted wanderer,
A Russian in my mood and mind.

from Henry David Thoreau
Here is a small reddish-topped rush (is it the Juncus effusus, common or soft rush?), now a foot high, in the meadow with the cowslip. It is the greatest growth of the grass form I have seen. The butterflies are now more numerous, red and blue-black or dark velvety. The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

from Frederick Douglass
In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

from Emily Bronte
The kitchin is in a very untidy state. Anne and I have not done our music exercise which consists of b major. Tab[b]y said on my putting a pen in her face, "Ya pitter pottering there instead of pilling a potate." I answered, "O Dear, O Dear, O dear, I will directly."

from Walt Whitman
The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready plowed and manured.

I'm on the road again today--a quick trip to southern New Hampshire, where I'll be working with a  group of eighth graders as well as few assorted parents and teachers in an after-school writing consortium. And then (except for my local high school project), my teaching travels are over for the season. Thanks to the Schafer family, who funded the grants that have allowed me to take the Frost Place on the road, I've had an unusually busy autumn. Still, I am looking forward to a snowy month or two at home. I seem to be on the cusp of another bout of writing, and it would be  a relief to have time and space for that seizure. I continue to slowly copy out Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, and I've finished another western Pennsylvania poem. But I also have a sense of emotional immanence, a kind of migraine aura without the physical pain, that so often presages my most productive periods. And I am beginning to reread my old childhood novels--Alcott, Dickens--those books I crave before I start my own writing. They are like a longing for mashed potatoes and hot vanilla pudding--a rich, predictable, invalid reading diet. They tell me, I hope, that I am getting ready for the work.

Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (4)

from William Blake
I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity.

from William Wordsworth
They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness.

from Dorothy Wordsworth
We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth. We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground.

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to one is involved in the solution of the other.

from George Gordon Byron
Ye, who aspire to "build the lofty rhyme,"
Believe not all who laud your false "sublime."

from Percy Bysshe Shelley
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world.

from Johann von Goethe, as transcribed by Johann Peter Eckermann
If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and as soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet; he must bid farewell to his free spirit, his unbiased view, and draw over his ears the cap of bigotry and blind hatred.

from John Keats
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body--

Saturday Night in Sangerville

Dawn Potter

Because, across a crowded table,

the man you have loved for twenty-five years

catches your eye and breaks into a smile

so bright it could light up the Yukon;

because, as you smile back through the candle flame,

your lanky fifteen-year-old leans all his wiry,

vibrating weight against your shoulder,

and your chair shudders and your neighbors laugh;

because when you put your arms around your boy

and press your cheek into his bristly hair,

he reaches for your hand and holds it against his own cheek

and doesn’t let you go;

because the man on the tiny stage dances

over the guitar strings as if his fat hands

are as fragile as the snowflakes

that sift slowly from the unseen sky;

because the crowd breathes alongside you

in easy patience, in careful, quiet joy;

because even time has paused

to shift its flanks and listen,

you say to yourself:

I will remember this.

I will remember this forever.

I will.

Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (3)

from Jan Kochanowski

Dear little Slavic Sappho, we had thought
Hearing thy songs so sweetly, deftly wrought,
That thou shouldst have an heritage one day
Beyond thy father's lands: his lute to play.

from Sir Philip Sidney

Now therein of all Sciences . . . is our Poet the Monarch. For hee doth not onely shew the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will entice anie man to enter into it.

from William Shakespeare

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.

from John Milton

For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are.

from Anne Bradstreet

I wash'd thy face, but more defects saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.

from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner. And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.

from Samuel Johnson

But whatever be the advantage of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated.

from David Crantz

If a Greenlander thinks himself aggrieved by another, he discovers no symptom of revengeful designs, anger, or vexation, but he composes a satirical poem.

from Phillis Wheatley

           Imagination! Who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?