Category Archives: poetry

James Stockdale, the longest held American prisoner of war in Vietnam,  said the love of poetry was an important quality for enduring the unendurable. “You thirst to remember, the clutter of all the trivia evaporates and with care you make deep excursions into past recollections. Verses were hoarded and gone over each day. The person who had memorized a lot of poetry was the bearer of great gifts.”

“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives… A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. “

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“One cannot be too scrupulous, too sincere, too submissive before nature… But one ought to be more or less master of one’s model.” 

–Cezanne

The world is no better than its places. It’s places are no better than their people while their people continue in them. 

–Wendell Berry

“I wish the people of the world loved each other as much as they love me.”

–Muhammad Ali

Goodbye you crazy good writer. Goodbye you purveyor of geek love, you hunter of living gargoyles, you lover of boxing as it should be and connoisseur of life in all its tawdry finery. We will miss you writing sentences that spin the head around.

P. S. Please finish Cut Man,
wherever you are.

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
–Mark Twain

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

–Rumi

”I wish I could show you, when you are lonely
or in darkness, the astonishing light
of your own being.”

–Hafez (Persian poet, 1325–1389)

The butterfly counts not months but moments, yet has time enough. 

-Rabindranath Tagore

In 1992, shortly before his death,  William Stafford was commissioned by the State of Washington to provide seven poems to be installed on plaques alongside the Methow river, one of the most beautiful rivers in all of the Pacific Northwest. Ask Me was installed along the river in the town of Winthrop. I can go only so long in my life without reading it. It is one of my anchor and lifeline poems and it belongs along that river the same way Tibetan Buddhist paintings belong on the stone canyon walls of Nepal. 

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford

“Use the right word, not its second cousin… Eschew surplusage.”

–Mark Twain