Beauty is a verb. Beauty happens. It happens to humans in condensed haiku-like moments.

There are no short cuts to real, living Beauty in this world. Compared to Beauty, there is nothing so helpless, or so powerful.

Is beauty the product or the process? At one time in my life, I would have emphasized the beautiful object. While the circumstances that produce a work of art may be anything but beautiful, it makes no difference to the end result. I still believe this, but as I have gotten older, I find myself increasingly drawn to the beauty of the process.

Poets are archaeologists, charged with excavating beauty from ruins. We are watchkeepers of human frailty and catastrophes, the infirmities of age, the inevitability of death. We point to the hidden tenderness of a rusted Edsel wedged in fields of yarrow, an apple made more beautiful by a spreading bruise. We dare ask, again and again, why we don’t understand what beauty is, but are compelled to seek out its most unexpected, least obvious arising.

The artist does not untie the knot. She is simply the servant of wonder, recording the annals of Presence.

Drunk as Adam and Eve, hornets
and bees gorge on the cider of bruised apples
at Fall’s bar even as the purpled dusk calls
out closing time, oblivious of the flight
home’s erratic traffic and nighthawk patrols.

Beauty smelled of tannin and it looked like the Hiwassee River and it sounded like Lucinda Williams singing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.”  Beauty is a real place I can touch in this world.

Shape, form and contact interlock to make beauty. I turn my vision outwards to see it.

We are here, they said. In the future, we’ll be gone and there will be other students but we’re glad we’re on the planet at the same time that you are. Music has times and measures but we won’t think about the transience of all that exists for these few minutes. That is what beauty is and I experienced it tonight.

and the sky is not blue
it is orange and white
and deep red
and clouds that skip
are like a woman’s hair running
teased and careful
straight along.

The first step towards the transfigured aesthetic response is the reader attraction where the reader finds himself as a part in the poem, then the poem will transform from the isolated external thing to a very special and specific thing in regard to the reader

The poet’s job is to dig the beauty out, to reconstruct it in language that tastes fine and fresh, to make the world a new place again where beauty is impossibly evident.

I see beauty in language. I love to tinker with words and come up with a phrase that is beautiful because it has resonance. That is, it creates a magic. It’s bigger than just the words. That is a moment of beauty to me. The other way i look for beauty in my work is creating an emotional connection to my reader. I want to know that I have possibly moved the reader in some way. Maybe it’s a sense of knowing what i mean, or being moved.  These two things, the playing with language and the emotional connection are what creates beauty when I write. 

Beauty allows us. It is not a matter of creative maturity, but of sensitivity and wisdom. The alterations dissolve in the daily routine and we enter the state of poetic consciousness that connects the prosaic with the lyrical, the mundane with the symbolic, allowing us to express beauty.

These days when I think of beauty, I think of the children’s picture book I keep by my bedside: Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by the great Barbara Cooney.  This book is a timeless gem that tells the reader, through story,  one of the most important tasks in this lifetime is to contribute something of beauty to the world. 

Beauty is when you land upright, especially if you are doing something like a figure skating jump.

What is this light?
I do not know. I do not get it right,
yet here’s the world. And here I am, and you? 

It seems to me that beauty exists when any being most lucidly expresses its own life-magnifying nature.

I have an interest in seeking beauty everywhere, and I charge myself with infusing the beautiful into words, braiding it into rhythm and rhyme, and I strive to make choices with beauty in mind.

Beauty occurs in sudden relationships: daylight from two windows falling differently on two sides of a face at once, an adjective from childish things cropping up in a phrase that would otherwise be too full of mourning, an arm in clay with a bent elbow I tilt or extend just enough to finally embrace its atmosphere.

Perhaps it’s easiest to say this — There are stones, bricks, metal and mountains. There is the great volume of space around these things. And there is how light shines down upon these things, warming them, making even the hardest surfaces shimmer.