Month: October 2016

It is a transient intimacy with truth, when the layers of life are exposed, revealed in a completed majesty. It is a fleeting experience, a halt in existence that our temporal selves cannot maintain. It arrives unexpectedly, when looking at the face of a child, an old person’s hands, an animal’s tenderness to another outside of its kind.

Often it is the curve of a line in one corner of painting that is otherwise unremarkable. Always it is the light in the eyes of the woman I have loved for forty years. It is too easy to get lost in big ambitions that lead you away from beauty.

Flickering through the poem is a kind of transformative light, often quite literally light, at different times of day, shining on every place

It is a sense of peace. It is feeling my hair getting messed up in the wind at the beach. It is the sputtering of raindrops on a sunny day. It is the crackling of a fire. It is being at the zoo wrapped in the magnificence of animals whose spirits are entwined with mine. It is the childish delight of snowflakes on my tongue.

Beauty is getting out of bed every morning in a sun-speckled house smells of bacon, coffee that laces with whisky and a social strategy around my laptop that fends off a fur-shedding dog, busy-fingered children and a wryly pragmatic husband.

Words are simultaneously a passageway to the soul within and an escape plan to things far bigger than any of us combined. Words have been known to spark revolutions of all kinds; doesn’t matter if a revolution in question is a mere ripple on the water.

splashes of crimson spill over lingonberries when fireweed blazes and paints an alpine meadow with warmth of summer sweetness

All that I really understand about the nature of beauty is that it is somehow bound up with time. When we witness something that overwhelms our senses with its beauty, we are briefly anchored in the present moment…

Beauty lies in the process of creation; it is a flux, a constant quest for self-recreation as we project our versions of memory and aesthetic emotions on canvas or paper with a brush or a pen. Our perception of beauty is subjective but becomes more meaningful once shared, and once shared, it doesn’t belong to us anymore, the way a finished poem no longer pertains to its author.

Our relationship with beauty can also lie beyond form. Form is impermanent, and though there is beauty in form, it is through form that we get to understand that which lies beyond form. To me, beauty is this essence, as well as impermanence.

As a bookseller, I enjoy watching readers overturn myths about poetry, beginning with the misconception that poetry somehow belongs to a select few. It belongs to everyman, and everyman’s buying poetry that, through beauty, connects our inner worlds.

I feel a reservoir of joy well up when seeing momentary glimpses of beauty. It happens, too, when looking at someone I love. I also find huge pleasure in small, handmade treasures, a box covered in marbleized Italian paper or an exquisite letterpress card.

I find it beautiful when I can still turn my attention/inspiration elsewhere, be free to share and celebrate what is bliss in the world, or what is gentleness; what is itself so much according to the nature of its essence as to release us, remind us of, as, Anne Sexton wrote, the birds making sense of air.

We depend on poetry’s existence even if we don’t often encounter it, just as we should depend on the existence of natural wilderness even if we are never able to visit it in person. Its mere presence suffices to make us aware that life and the world are not all mundane, and can be viewed in a special lens when we need an extra push of the soul.

but pomegranate wine only ever carries bitterness, and the sky was purple that day with a sadness of its own; and she drank it in with open lips.

Through tufts of grass, creeping jenny flickers and still the stones wait. Fog and dew web the meadow, the small cairn in the center. Ragged path rings the circle, fixed and frozen.

The mental worlds I create are inclusive in the sense that the reader is free to participate in the imaginings – I leave enough gaps in the poems for participation, and it is in the reader’s creative participation that beauty (real enough to be true) is born.

When I lived in Manhattan, I found West 10th Street beautiful. Now, in rural Tennessee, I get as much pleasure from the belted Galloway cattle. Much of beauty seems to depend on what you get to see, on what is around you.

Beauty is, perhaps, the supreme liminal space: the point of contact between who we used to be and who we could become; between profane and sacred, temporal and eternal, human and divine. Of the myriad ways to live out this calling, I have come to understand my own path as an aesthetic of joy, where is joy understood as something deeper and broader than mere pleasure, independent of temporary fulfillments.

My poem “Leaves of Words” is a homage to urban beauty, to the unexpected and spectral, the extravagance of the everyday. It’s also a nod to the president of our Brooklyn poetry past, Walt Whitman…

We watched as they were crowded into vans, still gesturing with pouts and outstretched palms.

A porcelain cup A desk full of books A mind decorated with beauty and art A poet sitting there creating more beauty,

I feel beauty when I write, when I wear what I want, when I scream at the top of my lungs because I will not be silenced. I see beauty in others when they do the same. Beauty is letting yourself exist.

The flowers of cherry trees glowed a pulsing red. On the AM radio, a woman’s voice crossed the frequencies from a thousand miles away.

As best and often as I can, I try slow my breath and pause my mind and immerse myself in the beauty that sits in the small moments so otherwise easily missed.

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.

One way to think about poetry’s relationship to beauty is that poetry pays homage to the loss of the original experience but concentrates something of its essence through a transfiguration. It is a way of keeping the sun in a jar.

What I hope to achieve with my readers is a moment where our minds meet in that mysterious realm where beauty lies, and a spark of recognition yields a subterranean clarity, a sharpening of the senses and a softening of the heart.

If I were young again, I’d sing of coolness of high mountain snow flowers, sprinkle of night glow-blue meadows; I would dream and stretch slim fingers into distant nowhere, yawn slowly over endless prairie miles.

I will turn the blank pages
Into poems fleshed from
The pond of my memory bank
Baited with the history of old
Mexico

Stendhal wrote, beauty is “the promise of happiness.” Thus beauty is conjectural, enigmatic, a stand-in for longing — that delectable neurosis. I would tell you its impact on or relation to my poetry, but then I would have to live up to my delusion.

… Beauty is the back door with white spider webs in the corners I open and see the sun over that high grass and I am only three and lift my arms to that warm light thinking that’s where I came from. Beauty is a face in a shroud in a cloud in a crowded market, a deaf-mute handing me a pamphlet that says Blessed are the Thankful as I’m picking out an avocado.

Beauty works up desire. Looking down an aspen valley in color from a mountain pass, one cannot hope to possess what they see, but they are compelled to return. When a poem lets beauty in at the eye–like love in the Yeats’s Drinking Song–or by the ear, the perceiver gains the pleasure of wonder that slowly sweeps through them, ever elusive.

For the women clutching reeds, leavened bread and precious wine,
may there be many birds casting seeds through the wind.
May each meal be wild with honey melting on the soft muscle
of your tongue.

I am writing for time, clarity, the lucidity of parsed
moments. I am writing to leave a small fossil that
says I lived pressed into the medium that killed me.

Unleaf yourself beneath the Bois d’arc tree and let my chisel-tongue inscribe your bloom with glyphs, the cuneiform for vine and grape.