Month: February 2017

Color. I choose color. Although I also choose the night sky with its fiery silver stars and no other colors at all. I choose flowers, especially the ones that lure my vision into their entrancing center. Poppies, columbine, the daffodil. I choose silk or moss or certain musics.

My grandmother once said to find the beauty within every person, every object, because they were “that of God”. This is Quaker-Mennonite-Amish-talk for the concept that God is everywhere, in all things, and we have to find the hidden kindness, or special aspect, because God is somewhere inside.

Beauty resides deep within. Sometimes it ventures out to show itself. Beauty is the most intimate thing. Beauty is what is in the moment – the memories may fade away in time or, if we are fortunate enough, they could stay with us forever. Beauty is everywhere.

I believe that beauty in poetry comes from the combination of words, images, and emotions. Even a horrific subject like war or a mundane subject like socks (a la Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks”) can be made somehow beautiful with words. For me, in the writing process, this often involves focusing on the sounds in a poem—vowel or consonant sounds—and looking for sound echoes.

I have always, from childhood, felt a yearning for the beauty which is to be found in the human presence, in areas of our lives like neighbourhood and community, the smaller communities, the villages, the lived-in countryside, very often. Many of my poems seem to focus on those places and moments where the human world and the wider natural one meet and fuse.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming – Two Poems   Leftovers The Chinese understand leftovers. How food...

I’ve come to realize that beauty arises from, and is the essence of existence. We cannot exist (long) without it, nor can we define it. It is like Buddha nature, it is there, independent of us – it does not require us, we require it. Children innately understand beauty, as we age we begin to seek it. We would be better served remembering the advice of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our job is merely to allow beauty in all of its shapes and forms.

Beauty is the self. One can feel it, realize its all pervading existence only when one tries to see for oneself; within oneself. A spectrum can be seen in a glass prism, crystal, diamond or even a water droplet – only when white light shines on it. That essential white light is beauty – like the self within.

The animals still alive in the forest of my memories are cut into two – diagonally – by a scarlet river which connects the cold earth to a sky filled with bright stars.

Eva M. Schlesinger – Four Poems   Egret’s Egress That egret white and still as bone...

As I watch, the room darkens until her figure disappears. What is left are glowing forms held up by invisible arms. A small voice whispers take them back, take them home, birth them again, paint them again these colors, let them fly through the trees like enlivened leaves, like wishes, prayers, and promises released from our mouths and minds into the great divine.

Notice and beauty aren’t quite interchangeable but they certainly travel together, whether it’s choosing the right red or watching through train windows as Gary, Indiana, rolls by, huge curls of scrap steel artfully coiled, as insistent and instructive as any gallery installation.

I have spent my life searching for beauty, from a gold compact stolen from my mother in childhood, to cardboard furniture when we could not afford anything else, to the row of parrots sitting on the backyard fence last week.

… humans have been driven to capture or replicate the beauty we see around us. Cave dwellers provided early examples and now quilters plant tulips on quilts, photographers gather the colors of a sunset, violinists trill like a songbird and poets use a palette of words for their canvas.

Goats on island cliffs contemplate the sea with a self-assuredness that is the equal of any great poet’s. They are the artists of what they see. And falcons, they embody beauty because they haven’t the time to passively look. They perform art as they fly, superbly appreciating its esthetic valor.

It is easy for me to find things beautiful. The way a man’s hands look when he holds his child. How the corners of the eyes crinkle when someone laughs. Steady sound, rain on a roof. Even the shine of a beetle’s back in sunlight. If you want to find beauty, you just need to learn how to pay attention.

I close in on a particular section of metal plate, where the colors are most vivid and the texture of the decaying metal has the most variety, and there I have it. A found artwork, an inadvertent collaboration of mankind and nature.

I believe that true beauty can be found in contrast. Consider the stars which illuminate the dark night sky, fields which must be burned in order to nourish crops, and the fact that there is no person in this world with a body that is perfectly symmetrical: one toe might be longer than others, a freckle might only be present on one hand.

I am moved by the peculiar. Maybe because it stands out for me and is likely to be real rather than what seems to be perfect but often turns out to be a put on. As a writer, honest writing that minces no words is what I find beautiful. People who are unabashedly themselves are very attractive to me.

What I find beautiful is what I find moves me. To me, beauty is vulnerability, is open, is fluid and raw. It’s something that is able to exist in the real world, but still see beyond the grit. I’m not sure if this makes any sense to anyone else, but as both a reader and a writer, I’ve felt the most beauty in those dark moments that are determined yet to shimmer.

… ‘Beauty’s impact on the viewer is the urge to replicate it.’ For me, beauty in its broad sense remains an indefinable, mystical quality like a signpost to perfection. It draws me inward to contemplate. I’ve been affected by beauty’s presence in ways that have changed my life—when I toured the art and history of Italy. Beauty is a blessing that can be found anywhere. I love that beauty is always close at hand, to nurture and still, and to fuel the urge to create.

Beauty is that rare element of strangeness and elegance that triggers surprise, or even astonishment, in the familiar or ordinary. In the extraordinary or unfamiliar, it can excite a sense of awe approaching, and encompassing, reverence. In poetry, it can be the sonorous richness, the music pitched in an untold number of different keys and timbres, playing behind or in or through the images. Or it can be the images themselves, even if stark, harsh, and atonally expressed—whatever serves to intensify, deepen, or vivify.

My son … cooks for his roommates. Two of them are vegetarian. [He] researches vegetarian meals, cooks for them and bakes bread. His heart is so full when he makes them happy. I am so proud. My arms are around all of them. That is beauty to me.

the artist’s job is to try to polish the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary until it becomes transcendent. I know how grandiose that sounds but the key phrase is “try to.” I try to make my poems beautiful objects. I work with moving relations of sound and sense, of the concrete and the abstract, of vision and voice. I want to make things full of grace and utility.

Beauty surrounds us. It is in the first crocus against a bed of soft snow, a blue morpho butterfly fluttering through the jungle growth, polychrome mountains against a cloudless sky. It is beyond the visual, also – the chanting of a predawn procession, fresh-baked bread on a Sunday morning, the burst of a ripe strawberry as you bite into it, an embrace

For the last 60 years I’ve been practicing the piano almost daily. I will never be a concert pianist, I no longer even accompany in church or community theatre. I simply sit down on the bench and begin again. What I’m really doing is practicing beauty: its creation, its presentation— in my own ears, if not in the rest of the world’s.

The kind of beauty we are talking about is not skin-deep or merely ornamental. It is the kind that not only draws our attention, but something so satisfying that we want more of. It is somewhat like love, something we know but is hard to explain. And like love it is authentic.

Our world in its essence is a transfiguration of beauty and all of us appreciating it. We can see the immense impact of the colors and perfumes on our daily life, and our existence is simply an incessant attempt to find beauty.

Beauty is a full moon over Lake Michigan, shrouded in smoky, backlit clouds and illuminating the rippled path of a sailboat. You can’t look away. It’s both exquisite and excruciating—causing the face to wince in the same way it would to express pain. And that’s what beauty is: pained gratitude for what can be endlessly contemplated yet never possessed. Even as it inflames our acquisitive, collector’s instincts, the beautiful eludes our grasp.

We have many more than the five senses we were taught about in school, and when these senses respond to beauty, a complex neuron dance is cued in our bodies. For me, beauty exists everywhere, and I feel the rhythm of that dance throughout each day, regardless of my mental or emotional state. I have to experience beauty to survive.

Ideal Beauty is clearly unattainable in this mortal life, like King Tantalus reaching for the ever-receding fruits of Hades or beautiful Narcissus falling in love with and dying into his watery reflection at the expense of The Other in life. Epochal beauty is forever ephemeral, forever changing.

Theocritus called beauty “an evil in an ivory setting.” I like to think of it as an ivory ambivalence, a powerful warning of the elusive complexity innate in life,a thin, unbreakable mirror that reflects the shining ambiguity of nature and mankind.

It seems easy to write about Nature with a big N. Nature is “beautiful.” Then you examine it, and it’s blood and sex and fang and claw. Past that aspect of ugly truth, beauty comes around again. Or maybe awe.

I paint deep eyes on the white canvas / they collapse in determined melodic chants / and hunt the song of uncommon shadows