Author: admin

Beauty is the wound that heals you as it digs further. It’s what all poetry, all art that is truly art is after. When I see it in poetry, I know it because, to paraphrase Dickinson, it takes the top of my head off. Beautiful poetry reaches between our ribs and makes a home there by shifting our organ around and becoming a part of us forever.

She keeps her sadness hidden, eyes clear and direct, mouth curved in a gentle smile, but when her hands touch the keys, a new richness seeps through her fingers, hangs for a trembling moment in the expectant air, then disperses into our changed minds.

Some people often speak about objects, concepts, and individuals as being beautiful. These are things that might stand out to them or resonate with them. In Buddhism texts, there’s often a reference to the beauty of nature—the trees, the flowers, the mountains, and the animals. The lotus, which is often seen in Buddhist realms, is one of the most beautiful flowers. The way it grows in the mud and erupts into a spectacular living thing is phenomenal.

When St. Augustine was asked to define Time, he responded, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” That’s how I feel about Beauty.

I suspect that what we consider beautiful is often a bit strange; there is beauty in the ordinary, but beauty is that which is not ordinary. When I see or hear something beautiful, I feel it in my body and breath. Beauty exists everywhere, including in the midst of great suffering and ugliness; perhaps that kind of beauty is the most potent of all.

You ask me if I want to indulge in some panipuri & spicy pickled mango. I say no & you listen. You should have insisted. I would have said yes.

Writing should appear with multi-expressive structures, where the sentences bring the same deep idea, but in different superficial statements. In this mosaic transfiguring system, the sentences appear as mirrors, where every sentence is a mirror to the deep idea and to other one.

I was walking with my wife on the beach and she was taking pictures of the sun and waves. On the sand, I stumbled upon a dead fish, half eaten. And to me, that was the most beautiful thing I saw on the beach. So I took a picture of it. And my wife, knowing my odd sense of beauty, just laughed.

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.

I’ve seen it in a lake reflecting autumn trees, a loon swimming through the reds and oranges. I’ve felt it in the vivid colors of a friend’s painting. Sometimes beauty is simply a slice of lemon meringue pie on a Delft blue plate or a dandelion growing in a field at Norris Campground.

Beauty is the Incarnation of divinity, nothing less. As with many Incarnations, paradoxically, it often escapes notice. Its asymmetry at times can fool the eye, the mind, and the heart. Everything, every large, abstract idea is contained in the smallest particularity. A quail’s egg holds the Big Bang.

There is a moment when something is on the precipice of being overwhelming to the soul. A undeniable takeover of emotion, of being possessed in an almost spiritual way.

I call it “Beauty” when something stops me in mid-sentence, when the only words I can find are oh, yes. “It” can be almost anything: a curious slant of light on dark clouds, tide-drawn lines on the sand, a pencil line drawn just so on paper, a passage of music, two colors next to each other.

I see beauty in everything. It’s easy for the natural world to bear witness to this: the smell of rain, a bejeweled night sky, the way a fallen leaf curls on the ground.

Defining beauty is as inspiring as it is troubling. Despite the desire to infuse beauty into every poem, poets too are baffled by the challenge. Beauty exists—objectively and subjectively. Beauty can be seen, heard, and felt.

I love the souls who find beauty everywhere. Like in William Carlos Williams’ poem “Between Walls” the speaker describes a particular image, in a passageway by the “back wings” of a hospital. The setting is one of those barely acknowledged places, trashy parts of everyday life in urban societies, a place “where nothing will grow.”

A moment of perception occurs and a glimpse of beauty caught in the seemingly unrelated. Unexpected insights reveal the entirety in the part; we have the grace of being able to experience the segment while simultaneously dreaming of the whole.

Beauty is that elusive bird that I don’t quite believe in, but I have to know is out there, that ivory-billed woodpecker thought to be extinct for 50 years but turns up in the Arkansas hinterlands.

To find beauty I step outside and stay open. I walk, tend wildflowers and vegetables, feed the birds. I watch and wait, then go inside and write haiku and Japanese short forms. I find consolation in the beauty and grace of nature. When I see something beautiful, I want to share it in a poem.

Poetry is a way of speaking directly to the world. It is perhaps the most basic of the arts, as it comes out of the heart of the poet’s experience. Poetry enables the inner life of the artist to be transferred to and shared with the greater world. The shared object is the poem itself. There is no other thing than the poem.

I couldn’t say what constitutes beauty, but on some level beauty constitutes everything. Writing poetry, I don’t feel so much like I’m creating beauty as channeling it, presenting the beauty inherent in the language and the content.

There are moments when beauty suddenly strikes, a new woodpecker at the feeder, the lonely awk…awk…awk of a single goose on a pond, an early morning mist over hundreds of geese on that same pond, the quiet stalking of an egret in a brackish inlet near the sea, a red dawn sky revealed when you pull up the blinds, a row of nearly-blooming cherry trees.

When I first read the lines in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “…beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror…” I finally found the words for how I experienced beauty.

There was a small stream cutting through our property back Snydersburg Road. When I was nine years old, or so, I found an arrowhead in the gravel by the stream. When I washed it in the water, I could see the delicate flaking of the thing as a network of lights and shimmering darks, and I found this ancient piece of worked stone to be beautiful.

Water, one winter morning, awakens. Dew glistens on fallen leaves. A breeze lays her damp washcloth across my forehead. I’m still in the fever of my boyhood, sweating out cinematic nightmares below the comforter, the ceiling full of green stars.

In a perfect world, I think that there would be a camera that sees the soul of a person, instead of just the outer layer—the camera of choice for magazine ads. That way, we would know if what we are looking at on televisions and in magazines is actually beautiful.

Beauty is usually found between flaws and surprises. Beauty isn’t an ideal for me to chase, or an aspiration. It’s something you find by chance, or in an unexpected place, not by searching or questing for it.

The natural world will continue to portray beauty whether or not anyone cares. Thus, as a poet, I try to make myself care and pay attention, I try to see the world differently so that I can truly interact with nature and life outside of myself.

Beauty lives in small things. In the shape and shadow of lean back muscles under his skin. In the helix of birch-tree branches exploring the upper reaches of their sky. In the feminine s-curve mouth of a teapot. Maybe that’s why my poems tend to be smaller than average. I love to discover the ways in which the most majestic of things – continents and gods and love eternal – etch their marks on the smallest of surfaces.

If you look hard at sorrow without giving up on life, you will see beauty. You will see that sorrow is only possible if you have a deep connection to something outside of yourself, and beauty is the manifestation of that connection to your perception. So, yes, beauty is also in joy, because joy is the immersion in that connection.

What surprises me is when I find beauty in unusual places like the grace of two delivery men, the lonely sound of a train whistle, or the thought of laundry on a clothesline having human emotions. As a poet, I feel I must always be open to what the world will offer, so that I may respond with words I hope will encompass the beauty in front of me.

Beauty survives even in trying times. Beauty helps us to survive. Now each day I try to find and to recognize something beautiful.

Poetry places limits on the fractal metaphor, so you can only zoom down to, say, the word or sounds where they interplay at the sensory and sense levels, where they contradict and confirm. Pulling back to the lines, you witness the interplay within and between.

White Buffalo is an attempt at song. How Is It Enough To Say is a quarrel with certain tenets of Confucian thought—carried forward in song. Apex is a meditation—in the now near-erased voice of prayer—written in fragments of song. Beauty is a lasting song. In some form.

Beauty is a primary kernel of being; it is that faith that pulses us towards the soulful alchemy of tomorrow’s melody.

I think perhaps “beauty” is the term for what we experience in those moments we escape our ego-community, the ones when all the energy tied up in whether or not we are doing what we should be, whether or not we are going to be able to get what we need or accomplish what we feel like we must, whether or not others are treating us equitably

Beauty for me is the essence of now-ness. In poetry my task is to find language and context that invite readers into the quirks of my ravishment. If my language can startle or disorient perhaps it can invite.

It seems we meet beauty not by definition but by experience – an openness, a willingness to be taken by surprise.

Beauty exists, but demands to be discovered by the artist. Like the passing of invisible soothing hands over his eyes, he is now capable to superimpose passion and creativity over the mundane of this world in an alchemy that transforms mere notes, basic colors and inert words into the language of the eternal.

Beauty is the tuning fork of the universal. We seek it out, we feed off of it, and we desire more. We want to chain our hearts to beauty, to possess beauty, hold beauty closer than life itself. Inner beauty runs by different rules. Though I believe beauty is a force, an aura, an inner light, the mind of God, what have you.

I think of beauty as a superfluous grace. It’s an unpredictable and spectral light born out of our perceptions. It livens and freshens. It need not have any calculable form or ethical value. It can appear differently to each individual. A symbiosis between the world and the perceiver.

First, I conjure visual beauty, the paintings I share with children as an art docent in my granddaughter’s class and some amazing photos that friends share over social media. I’ve become aware recently how photos get doctored and how famous art has faded. Visual beauty changes across time. Acoustic and linguistic beauty changes less.

The more deeply we think about our world, the stronger we feel about it. We experience the world’s pain. We experience the artist’s pain, the scientist’s pain, the child or parent’s pain. And this pain, which resides in our hearts and souls and even our bodies, gives rise to joy.

If you say the night, or a woman, is beautiful you mean more than ‘attractive’ or ‘appealing’. Beauty contains those concepts but is deeper and wider. Something that is beautiful is mesmerising, inspiring an emotional response that leads to reflection and even revelation.