John Keats

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? ― John Keats, Letters of John Keats. (Oxford University Press, July 15, 1970) Originally published January 1st 1954.

Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow […]

Fernando Pessoa

If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there forever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever painting the curve of the hills… If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, […]

Stanley Plumly

Inevitably alchemy, the lesser into the greater, morphing to the pupa stage, the chrysalis, but faster, the cuticle of skin sloughed off, regrown, and shed again, each larval, instar meta phase passing through more molting lives than saints — five, six times before the final birth, then into the light, like eyes wadded up, then […]

Eliot Weinberger

What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird. — Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing. (New Directions; 1St […]