Poem: Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

        Billy Collins

 

April is National Poetry Month

These times

These are times in which a genius would wish to live.
It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose
of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
Great necessities call out great virtues.
When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart,
then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant,
wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

    Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Quincy Adams 

 

 

 

 

Awesome

The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge,
or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory,
but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing:
Sacred Awe!

            Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

 

 

 

 

 

Law

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power.
Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world,
and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

                Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

 

 

 

 

 

April Fool

The fool doth think he is wise,
    but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

                William Shakespeare, As You Like It