Month: November 2016

It could be eyes, certainly; they are powerful lures. It could also be an oddity—shimmer or color or shadowy depth. It should certainly surprise.

When I was a little girl I loved to see, and wanted to make – and to be part of – the beautiful. Then, this meant dressing up as princess or gypsy, imagining a life surrounded by human art or nature, riding gorgeous horses, being graceful and spirited.

But the scope of this – a feathered choir in full voice, how many thousands I could not know, an all-out vocal blitz, filling the woods with something indefinably joyous, something witnessed once only, as a miracle.

In both people and art, I find myself strongly drawn to that which is lit from within.

Beauty is a composition between pauses and movements, where fantasies are sung and dissolutions can become engraved in marble. Beauty is pregnant with both the sacred and the profane, beating along with the naked eye of the heart blooming into an infinite prayer. Primordial, beauty is the essence of fiction.

Great blue heron at the pond of the Tuileries gardens: incongruous presence of this animal among the splendors of the past

The unexpected is where i want to go—opening, surprise. To take myself, and the reader, somewhere—into an experience. Experience is what it’s about: aliveness. Aliveness is what i seek, and that’s where the beauty is–sometimes a difficult joy, a hard gratitude.

We celebrate as one by one we claim our own self realisation. Out of this flows the world’s revelation and a new intuitive poetry emerges as the voice of the Mother who weeps for our return to the ancient worship of Beauty and Delight.

A beautiful element always uplifts and persists even in the most depressing subjects. It’s always an affirmation of life, regardless of what happens to the vessel that carried and brought it forth.

It is both intangible and ephemeral, but more importantly it is defining because beauty is what we strive for and what drives us to continue to be more than what we already are.

A fluid sense of beauty encourages the need to create, invent, explore something new “under the sun.”

In poetry, I like to think about euphony, the pleasantness of sounds. It is interesting to think that this is all language specific and culturally relative. However, beauty is also something like a universal emotion. Experiencing something that strikes you as beautiful is a unique kind of joy.

Deep beauty resides in the imperfect – in the broken, in the power generated by something that’s burning. Though a flower, a youthful human body, captures attention – I am always drawn back to the beauty of the worn.

what can be heard, or seen, or touched, or smelled, or tasted, even blurred by rain or time, even when it doesn’t rhyme, even when it’s only read.

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. Any definition is just out of reach.

I suppose I can say that beauty is the opposite of conforming, of “mass-produced.” Beauty is bravery and risk.

I’ve never seen Blake’s tyger, but I have seen my wife, Janice, in action. I’ve seen her use every element of her energy and creativity in a near heartbreaking struggle to make beauty, to force it ready in time for a performance. Out of her working of craft and purpose, beauty will mysteriously emerge

It would be better to think of it as a verb, a transitive verb. To make beautiful. Beauty is a residue from the act of applying love. Without that act of love, beauty will never really exist.

If I were Leonardo da Vinci, say—which I am not, just to be clear—I would draw a special Venn Diagram, illustrating that shady area where art and life intersect. I would call that area Beauty.

You can build a new path in an unknown area of your mind or destroy the old bridges and replace them with the modern, high-tech structures. I like to keep the old paths as the memorial signs in my mind.

These days, I think of ephemerality as beauty, and as a poet, I’m in a war with time, trying to capture tiny pieces of the world as we all hurtle toward the end.

beauty is bound up in our five senses: through colour, music, taste, touch and fragrance the divine is revealed. If, as a writer, I can render an experience of wonder in words, crystallise that emotion on the page and share it with readers, that is a privilege beyond compare.

Beauty is a form of mutual resonance, like a tuning fork vibrating to the same pitch as another turning fork. In this sense, it is also a kind of recognition, not merely of something superficially pretty outside ourselves, but something that resonates with some similar thing inside us.

I have decided to stop and cease this doing and undoing, and walk on the heaviness of streets, (in grief and joy, their meanings unknown) and perhaps, perhaps make a life.

Beauty is something that startles, makes you catch your breath– Like Emily Dickinson’s saying if it feels like the top of my head is taken off, I know it is poetry. The same with beauty.

The consensus seems to be that whatever beauty is, it does not last; but it and love are among the best things humanity has come up with.

I set out to make poetry from my everyday life that finds its place among the stars and in the mud at our feet, but I take poetry where I can find it, and sometimes the lives of others enter and take up residence in my heart.

I see poetry as our ultimate endeavour to describe those things that transcend language, of which beauty is one of the foremost occurrences. Poetry tries to lift the veil, to give us a new view on the beyond.

Beauty may be the unspoken reason why someone is so kind or listens so well. It may be a distilled version of love that appears after the years have fallen away — a version that either coexists in peace with one’s current life, or refuses to let go.

As the eye gazed out further, however, perspective was restored and the landscape was whole again. The vast green plains and honey-colored fields of Burgundy fanned out towards the horizon. The sun balanced like a copper penny on the thin line between day and night.

Keats magic casement is not merely the vision of a Romantic, but that of every child that has witnessed the world as fresh. It is the casement where the O of astonishment lifts their cheeks and opens their lips in silent awe, the casement where amazement, exultation, exuberance, and transcendence appear.

There are traces of the beautiful in the barrel, the barrow, the cultured back yard — evidence, yes, but the thing itself escapes me. I write about throwing pots as a metaphor for this small practice of mine. Trying to find the beautiful form.

I was returning from my morning walk, enjoying a spectacular sunrise on the river. It occurred to me then that particularly striking sunrises always had some clouds in the picture. It was the clouds that lit up for a brief moment, transformed from a dull grey into luminous shades of orange and gold

when you see inside – the beauty of the whole world – shines forth from the depths