Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 12/13/2013| 1 Comment »
The rose was
not looking for the morning:
on its branch, almost immortal,
it looked for something other.
The rose was
not looking for wisdom, or for shadow:
the edge of flesh and dreaming,
it looked for something other.
The rose was
not looking for the rose, was
unmoving in the heavens:
it looked for something other.
-Federico García Lorca
Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 06/25/2013| 1 Comment »
You’re learning how to hold the note, I say to an aspiring novelist
All the parts of yourself, the black and the pink
Combine in an unholy alliance
And become green topiaries
Because we never see what it is. Only what we make
Because there must be love in this land
Because to be is not to be all
Because the ineffable can be named in metaphor
If there was ever anything that came out of you that was real…
It.
To what?
To make It.
What is It?
You’ve come too far into the intermediate realm, she says, anger in her voice.
-Nina Alvarez
Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 06/18/2013| Leave a Comment »
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
-Lord Alfred Tennyson
Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 04/01/2013| 1 Comment »
HAPPY FIRST DAY OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!
1
A cloud moved close. The bulk of the wind shifted.
A tree swayed over water.
A voice said:
Stay. Stay by the slip-ooze. Stay.
Dearest tree, I said, may I rest here?
A ripple made a soft reply.
I waited, alert as a dog.
The leech clinging to a stone waited;
And the crab, the quiet breather.
2
Slow, slow as a fish she came,
Slow as a fish coming forward,
Swaying in a long wave;
Her skirts not touching a leaf,
Her white arms reaching towards me.
She came without sound,
Without brushing the wet stones,
In the soft dark of early evening,
She came,
The wind in her hair,
The moon beginning.
3
I woke in the first of morning.
Staring at a tree, I felt the pulse of a stone.
Where’s she now, I kept saying.
Where’s she now, the mountain’s downy girl?
But the bright day had no answer.
A wind stirred in a web of appleworms;
The tree, the close willow, swayed.
-Theodore Roethke
Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, rilke, words, Write, Writer, writing on 03/07/2013| 4 Comments »
Happy 6th Birthday to this little poetry site. I want to thank it and thank its readers for being such a source of pleasure to me. I have done little to facilitate it: sharing my favorite poems, posting once in a while, but it seems to thrive nonetheless.
In honor of this – as well as nearing 200,000 hits – here is one of my favorite poems by Rilke. I first posted it in 2009, but only part. Here is the whole thing:
For the Sake of a Single Poem
…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them to early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the star’s, – and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 02/15/2013| Leave a Comment »
You know there is no money in poetry; you know that there isn’t.
And still you write your poems.
You know there is no money in publishing; you know that there isn’t.
And still you write your books.
People ask me: How do I make a living as a writer?
I say if you are trying to make a living, you are doing it wrong.
Come to this place bestowed on you with reverence. Let there be no moneylenders in your temple. Come often enough with all that you have, asking nothing but to be there at that one particular altar. Then, maybe after a long time, you will go home and find your coffers full of just enough money to eat and sleep comfortably, then return the next day to the temple with an offering of gold. That is how you make a living as a writer.
-Nina Alvarez
Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 01/18/2013| Leave a Comment »
A heavy heart, Beloved, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God’s own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being! Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature does precipitate,
While thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Posted in words on 01/02/2013| Leave a Comment »
I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That’s gone, it is true;
(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)
But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.
-Robinson Jeffers
Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, words, Write, Writer, writing on 12/28/2012| Leave a Comment »
Poem of the Month 
Win a free audiobook by Natalie Goldberg
Posted in words, tagged blue year worker, comment, contest, nina alvarez, Writer, writers block on 12/18/2013| Leave a Comment »
I’m running a quick, 2-day contest for writers on my new blog Blue Year Worker. Just click the link below and comment with one thing that has helped you break through writers block this year, even temporarily. Winner receives a free audiobook of Natalie Goldberg’s “Freeing the Writer Within.”
Thanks, readers!
http://blueyearworker.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/you-are-free-to-write-the-worst-junk-in-america/#comments
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