Poetry Foundation | Becoming is Superior to Being

Pena Mountain (Vermillion Cliffs National Monument) — Photo-Artistry by kenne

“The land is like poetry:
it is inexplicably coherent,
it is transcendent in its meaning,
and it has the power to elevate
a consideration of human life.”

— Barry Lopez

The Six Strings

The guitar
makes dreams weep.
The sobs of lost
souls
escape through it’s round
mouth.
And like the tarantula
it weaves Large star
to trap the sighs
floating in it black
wooden cistern.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

Image by kenne

“Beat Poets, not beat poets” 2 comments

Visitors to this blog site know that I often use the title-lead, “Capturing the Moment.” I also use the title-lead, “Capturing the Word,” but have been neglectful in using this lead-in of late. Last July 9th, I posted, “Capturing the Word — Robert Hass.” For the most part, the “Capture the Word” series was my way of featuring writers presented at the “Writers In Performance” series, at Lone Star College – Montgomery, over the years. The series, started by my friend Dave Parsons (Texas State Poet Laureate, 2011) and under the guidance of the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council (MCLAC), has attracted many outstanding writers, including Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Hass and his wife, Brenda Hillman. They appeared in the early days of the series, March 10, 1996, only three years after the series began. (The series is still going strong, with the next event being the 19th Annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Celebration with Nationally acclaimed Dickinson scholar, author and educator, Brenda Wineapple, who will discuss her book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson — and as always the “Gathering of Poets” at Conroe’s Corner Pub.)

Robert Hass is one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated and widely-read voices, so I was surprised to read of his being clubbed recently during an Occupy Wall Street protest in Berkley, California. Hass and his wife had gone on campus to see what was happening and how the police and students behaved. “If there was trouble, we wanted to do what we could to protect the students,” Hass wrote in today’s New York Times — “Poet-Bashing Police.” Trying to protect Brenda, after a cop shoved her to the ground, Hass was clubbed. Click here to read the opinion piece.

“There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

— from MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS by Robert Hass

kenne