Category Archives: Quotes

All People Deserve It

I believe that the highest quality of life is full of art and creative expression and that all people deserve it. I believe in a broad definition of what art is and who artists are: Barbers, cooks, auto detailers, janitors and gardeners have as much right to claims of artistry as designers, architects, painters and sculptors. Every day, our streets and school buses become art galleries in the form of perfectly spiked hair, zigzagging cornrows and dizzying shoelace artistry.

–Frank X. Walker, Creative Solutions to Everyday Challenges from NPR series This I Believe

Remembering

Cancer and Nova

The star exploding in the body;
The creeping thing, growing in the brain or the bone;
The hectic cannibal, the obscene mouth.
The mouths along the meridian sought him,
Soft as moths, many a moon and sun,
Until one
In a pale fleeing dream caught him.
Waking, he did not know himself undone,
Nor walking, smiling, reading that the news was good,
The star exploding in his blood.

–Hyam Plutzik

Snarky But He’s Got a Point

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

–Soren Kierkegaard

When I go work out at the gym, if it’s late afternoon, I am treated to televisions featuring Dr. Phil, Montel, etc. interviewing people about sordid things, or else a “Judge Judy” type of show demonstrating how people don’t handle conflicts well. I am simultaneously fascinated and appalled by these shows. Usually I listen to NPR on my Walkman, but sometimes I can’t help watching the show and reading the captions.

Another reason this quote captured my attention pertains to my viewing of Jarhead. In one part the troops are told that the media will be interviewing them, and their commander tells them explicitly what they may and may not say. One soldier asserts that this isn’t right, they’re being censored, that he signed up to defend a freedom he’s being denied. The response from his leader is (paraphrased): “When you joined the Marines, you gave up that right.” This was the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Even placing a call to a loved one in the states was difficult. How things have changed since the creation of email and blogging!

Another Saved Poem…From 1983

Still Life

My father is sitting on a duck
In the middle of a field
On our kitchen table.
A still life in fading black and white
Curling at the edges
The Kodak print holds a past
That belongs partly to me.
My father is no longer
Just a soldier’s face on the mantle
Or a brass plaque in the attic.
Now I am the daughter of a little boy
Who sits on the back of a duck
And squints into afternoon sunlight.
He knew me only as a photograph
Enclosed in an air mail envelope.
I know him only as a photograph
Curling on the formica table
And gazing endlessly from the mantle
Behind a sheet of glass
Which my mother won’t dust.

–Gretchen Hill

Bookmarking a Poem Saved Since 1989

I’ve had this poem shuffling around my file cabinet for many years. It’s time to put it somewhere more or less permanent.

The Graves of Cats

The graves of cats are not like
those of dogs or parakeets.
They have been slipped out of

a day or maybe two
after you packed the dark dirt
with the long-handled shovel.

Now as you play with the child
or drink a beer beside the stream
while the swallows skim the wheat,

the cats as though from under the table
stretch and slide past roots
and fallen leaves, and not a blade

of grass disturbed, not a worm,
except at the corner of your eye
there’s a small shift of direction

in the alfalfa, and for a moment
the evening preens and stares
in a way you almost call by name.

–Harry Humes

Poetry & Buddhism

Meditation is when you sit down, let’s say that, and don’t do anything. Poetry is when you get up and do something. Somewhere we’ve developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression, it is the way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection, it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn’t make sense anymore to mention inside or outside.

–Norman Fischer, Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry

[via Whiskey River]

Food

Food

I want mother’s milk,
that good sour soup.
I want breasts singing like eggplants,
and a mouth above making kisses.
I want nipples like shy strawberries
for I need to suck the sky.
I need to bite also
as in a carrot stick.
I need arms that rock,
two clean clam shells singing ocean.
Further I need weeds to eat
for they are the spinach of the soul.
I am hungry and you give me
a dictionary to decipher.
I am a baby all wrapped up in its red howl
and you pour salt into my mouth.
Your nipples are stitched up like sutures
and although I suck
I suck air
and even the big fat sugar moves away.
Tell me! Tell me! Why is it?
I need food
and you walk away reading the paper.

–Anne Sexton

Words Words Words

You can read another poem of mine here.

I’m thinking that’s where I’ll be spending more time for awhile.

Today I culled hundreds of magazines that I’d saved for “someday” collages. I’m going to recycle them. I kept a few dozen on hand, but the hoarding was becoming oppressive. In doing this exercise, I realized how many magazines we get that I hardly read. Many will not be renewed.

That Non-Computer Weekend I Suggested?

I haven’t really done that. Laurel turned me on to a poetry exercise, and I dove in. It provided immense pleasure in the writing. And of course I had to create a venue for it! As with knitting blather, I don’t want to bore my readers here with poetry (because obviously not everyone enjoys or “gets” it, though more folks would if they tried). Curious (and patient, indulgent) readers can read it here.

But I did get out with Husband to purchase a fluffy down comforter and machine-washable duvet. Our old comforter was ratty. I’ll post on that on the knitting/domestic arts blog later. We also saw The Weather Man; excrutiating to watch, bitterly humorous. Poignant for us, since the protagonist’s father is diagnosed with lymphoma, the same illness that killed my father-in-law barely one year ago.

Tomorrow I may draw or garden. Aiming to be true to my offline intention.