Category: Poetry

… ‘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