Month: November 2017

Judith Skillman – Five Paintings

What gives pleasure and exalts the mind and spirit, then, is nature in all its varied moods. As a painter I strive to capture scenes where light is focused in  a particularly moody way: a sunset, a cloudy Northwest day on Rattlesnake Ridge, a turbulent sea.

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Neil Ellman – Five Poems

Having studied other cultures and other times, it is apparent that beauty is a matter of culture, context and states of mind, even of economics and politics. Merely consider the 20th Century in which works by Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine were seen as ugly, tasteless and vulgar, and Soviet architecture was preferred by many.

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Marion Brown – Four Poems

Where verse is concerned, music is key. What a poet hears, the vernacular of the street or any other, is crafted with echoing sounds, stresses, pauses, strange words and familiar, which create an opportunity for expectation satisfied and surprise—the delight of language.

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D. R. James – Four Poems

Beauty is a quality of anything, really, that provokes in us, for whatever reason, an awestruck double-take, the prolonged or re-look, re-read, re-listen, re-touch, re-think. The “live” one ends, of course—the sunset, the concert, the intimate moment—and we often strive and contrive to experience another like it

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Becca Menon – Three Poems and a Translation

To every story,
            bliss or torment,
Beauty cries, “Brief!”
            but brings providence’ salve –
even love in grief –
            offers sacred relief.

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Chris Brauer – Surrendering to the Music

I never know what the hour will be when I emerge out of the deep recesses of my mind and return to the ‘real’ world.  Sometimes only an hour has passed and I have composed a thousand words; other times I emerge to find myself in the mid-afternoon with three or four thousand words on the page. 

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Andrea Potos – Four Poems

Though I cannot say for certain what beauty is, I know that it arrives as a recognition from within, a presence, an awe or quiet joy.  Beauty can only make us better humans, especially when we remain actively receptive to it

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Margaret Xuanyi Lu – Before the Warblers Began To Sing

Beauty is the nightingale’s soft song that echoes as the dawn draws. Beauty is the power of love; a power so strong it may potentially bind two strangers til death do them part. But most importantly, beauty is the incredibly potential of humanity.

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Wally Swist – Five Poems

Beauty is relative—however, it is also abundant and perennial. One type of beauty may diminish and morph into a deeper philosophical truth. Beauty can take the guise of morality and define the outer reaches of what it means to be fully human—to grow into that.

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Gail Tyson – Titanic Redux

I experience beauty as resonance. Dictionaries define that term as a vibration, a quality of richness or variety, and a quality of evoking response. All three alert me to beauty.

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Paul Beckman – Better Than TV

He reached out with his cane and hooked a branch with roses and carefully pulled it towards him and leaned over and smelled its fragrance. He then gently put the branch back with his cane, turned back around and continued his walk.

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Karen McPherson – Five Poems

Beauty is heavy stuff. Beauty is light.
I feel something tidal, a delicious pull
where feeling and thinking circle one another.
Beauty strikes a chord. Something resonates.
The light catches its own glancing.

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Leslie McGrath – Three Poems

I never stop being astonished by the ways we’re separated from every other human being, despite our intentions and desires, despite all our good efforts. Life seems to be a somewhat random sequence of approaches and separations, each of which is deeply compelling. Many people call this Beauty.

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Andrew Stancek – His Mother Told Him

Beauty? In the air I breathe during my daily walk, in words: “When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly, sweet cousin.” Mary Oliver, “Moss”. And “The sound of the ocean, the wind, your own heart.” Sylvie Germain, Magnus.

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Stephen Wehr – Five Poems

Beauty is an inner and outer experience, but the two were truly written by the same hand. The outer world recreates the inner world, “making this thing other,” recalling the inner world to its original beauty, despite great brokenness.

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Bree Barkwell – Four Poems

Give the world something beautiful to connect with and the meaning and value of it changes with every angle it’s perceived from, not to mention subject to the influences of the person evaluating it and the context it is being experienced in.

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Sheikha A. – Five Poems

Beauty is in stopping to matter whether anyone believes your stories because you discover the universe has long been writing for them to happen and in all the meandering, you have somehow seen the route.

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Anton Yakovlev – Four Poems

Beauty is the flower hanging from the chandelier above the bed of the mortally ill, reminding them that eating, drinking, and being merry is not always a requirement.

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Marjorie Becker – Four Poems

The particular realm of beauty I seek in my poetry is internal, is a series of linguistic references, even configurations about human tenderness. As a poet (and even as a scholar) I work from my subconscious, one full of an array of images, events, places, faces, and relationships.

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Patricia Fargnoli – Five Poems

Beauty is in design….the curve, the spiral, the spider’s web, the dive of an owl for its prey, the ten thousand symphonies of the stars. It is in poetry, in art, in the creative force that rules the universe.

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Laurel Peterson – Four Poems

The mind may define something as beautiful, but it is the body that recognizes it and provides us with the sudden intake of breath, the moment when we look up and see what we’ve always seen in a new way. And if, in that moment, I am granted a perception that I can put into words, then maybe I will be lucky enough to pass it on as a beautiful poem.

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William Ruleman – Three Translations

Perhaps it is best to approach beauty with humility. (I say this even while having to admit that beauty often catches us unawares, as when I first heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or, as one who had never been an admirer of tapestries, came upon some by William Morris on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum one afternoon and was reduced to tears.) Great works of art can surprise us in this way.

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Susan Tepper – Me & Mr. Grant

Cliff, so tall, had to bend low to open the limo door. And out stepped Cary Grant! Tanned, silver-haired, older than his movies, more solid-looking; yet unmistakably Cary Grant. And, attentive. To me!

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G. Louis Heath – Three Poems

In a world rendered inchoate by divisiveness and the limitations of human faculties, the words and images the poet employs connect the reader’s mind and emotions to an experience or object in the flux of the swirling events of life. Poetry grants access and focus for a mind to experience resolution and catharsis of all that besets it on individual and macro levels.

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Bob Bradshaw – Three Poems

We don’t need to look for beauty in only the obvious places: mountains, vast landscapes, fireworks. One finds beauty in even the smallest of places, in the nuances of a voice, in the wings of insects, in the blue sparks of forget-me-nots. Who would want to leave such a world?

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Pamela Miller – Three Poems

When I write, I try to not only gaze up in wonder at the waterfalls and meteor showers but also peek beneath a few rocks to see what oddly shaped forms of beauty might be lurking under there.

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