Poetry travels afar, afar, afar…in and out!

Thank you all for responding my calling of sharing two or three lines from a poem you like with brief comments. I would like to collect them and print them for our Haiku Canada Conference at UTM in May and also for 2017 West Chester Poetry Conference in June.

-Anna Yin, April 10, 2017

Here are my favorite lines:

Hope is the thing with feathers — Emily Dickinson

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh — Philip Larkin “The Trees”

Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. —Mary Oliver

and lines from “Self-Composed” by George Elliott Clarke in Poem in Your Pocket Day booklet

If I seem

A weed to some

Eyes, I dream—

And flower I am

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how you sneak through

crevices I didn’t know were there...(The first line of the poem is also the title.)

This poem by Danish poet Ulrikke S, Gernes goes on to wonder about the workings of our mind, even when we are asleep, and how dream images sometimes work as metaphor, how the mystery of imaginary or dream image stays with us to foster further consternation in daily life. -Claudia Radmore

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These are the last three lines of a short poem by Cid Corman, titled It Isn’t For Want.

feeling myself here
as long as you are–
as long as you are.

The emphasis, different in each of the last two lines, offers a sense of without those who are important in our lives, we are incomplete. That it isn’t enough to exist in isolation from the rest of the world.

If I may, though, one of my all-time favourite poems consists of a mere two lines. In its entirety:

“In a Station of the Metro”
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It is a vivid image of faces, passing by quickly, merely glimpsed, and yet out of the blur of that moment, distinct faces appear, as would cherry blossoms in the rain against the blackness of the tree’s branches. It also suggests the way memory sometimes works, momentary vignettes, snapshots, if you will, things that stand out from the blur of the everyday. –Carol Stephen

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And so it goes. Again meets again—

from the poem, Lake, The Celery Forest

while I stood chained to the sound

of the lock sliding time forward

and back into place like a zipper.

from the poem, Zipper, The Celery Forest

–Catherine Graham

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Susan Ksiezopolski‘s favorite prose poem is Desiderata by Max Hermann and here are my favourite lines:

“And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

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Heather Cadsby’s favorite lines are

Snail, snail, glister me forward

Bird, soft-sigh me home
Worm, be with me
This is my hard time – Theodore Roethke

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STRATEGIC PLAN

love everyone

hate no-one

move to the edge (from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016) sent by Janet Vickers

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sent by Susan McMaster, 2 sets of 3 lines from Bob Dylan’s “Ramona”. I find myself saying these sets of lines, separately or both together, quite often as my life passes and changes…

Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do

And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you

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from John B. Lee

I want to say to my sons

” … if you promise to imagine,

I’ll promise to remember …”

these lines are from the poem “Funny Violence and Cartoon Dreams” a poem which appeared in The Globe & Mail and in my book The Beatles Landed Laughing in New York (Black Moss Press, 1995)

these lines are followed by three more lines which read

But false memory

and desultory dreams

intervene

thereby suggesting a reason for which both my sons and I fell short of this idealistic aspiration.

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From Daddy, Sylvia Plath, 1962

I made a model of you,
A man with a black meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.

I think this is said to have been written about her husband, Ted Hughes, who was having an affair with one of their friends. The loaded word, meinkampf, telegraphs the hatred she felt as she wrote and, given the circumstances, the next line may have been fashioned to shed a very bright light on what she knew was happening.

-sent by Audrey Ogilvie

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from ‘Spring’ by the fabulous Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

For me, this is almost a challenge to really live life – that just being alive isn’t enough – engagement is the answer, & maybe try something outside the comfort zone… fill that cup! —Kj munro

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Sent from Denise M Neuhaus:

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.” -Omar Khayyam

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding. – Khalil Gibran

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