Category: Poetry

Jane Blanchard – Two Poems Eclipse You recognized another chance To witness quite a...

I am always in the process of creating beauty, delighting in beauty, and being beautiful.

Here’s what Emily says about capturing beauty: “The flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.”

Beauty is the long breath between seeing and coming to some sort of understanding, the tiny detail that attaches itself to your heart—the dance of honeybees, the slash of sunlight across a wooden floor, the invisible workings of the world.  Beauty is everywhere we dare to find it.

Flannery O’Connor had a penchant for the weird & the wild and a gift for finding beauty in both. After writing 101 poems in her voice, I have come to appreciate the strangeness she admired and become a convert to her brand of beauty. For what is symmetry, proportion, wholeness, and perfection—all classical ideals of beauty—set beside the homely, the lonely, the plain, and the maimed?