are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind."
---James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk


"To believe in the immortality of a poem would be to believe in the immortality of language. We must bow to the evidence: languages are born and die; any meaning will one day cease to have meaning. And isn't this ceasing to have meaning the meaning of meaning? We must bow to the evidence …"
---Octavio Paz, "Recapitulations"


Why does tragedy exist?

Because you are full of rage.

Why are you full of rage?

Because you are full of grief.
---Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

There is a kind of depression that empties the soul.
The eyes stay bright,
                             the mind stays clear as Canada on an autumn day
Just after the rain.
But the soul hangs loose as a plastic bag in a tree
When the wind has died.
                                        It is that drained.
And overcast. The little jack-weeds
That line its edges exhale,
And everything falls to a still, uneasy remove.
It stirs when the wind shifts,
                                             and seasons tumble and stall.
It stirs, but it doesn't disappear.
Though weeds re-up and the clouds relent,
                                                                     it doesn't disappear.

---Charles Wright, Littlefoot


"I see now that keen interest can illuminate anything, and that anything, moreover, has something worth illuminating in it, and that without that interest gates carved by Benvenuto Cellini from two diamonds would merely look chilly."
---Lord Dunsany


"The crucial thing in any work of any kind is that it must be a gift---the reader must possess it even more than the person who wrote it. It must be given completely."
---Jesse Ball


"Empathy isn't just something that happens to us---a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain---it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own. To say 'going through the motions'---this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort---the labor, the motions, the dance---of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind.

"This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones."
---Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams


"Investigation"

This much is known:
the thread you never
let go of
guided you back.
And when you emerged,
years later, light
hurt your eyes.
Blood on your rusted
blade was dry.

But what happened
in the labyrinth?
In deepest dark
you grappled,
felt its breath
on your face,
stabbed,
and fled.

                A monster?
Wouldn't anything
cry like that,
pierced to the heart?

---Gregory Orr


"Poetry is a shared social space."
---Mary Jo Bang


"There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map."
---Anne Michaels, "The Drowned City, Part I"


desire,
a huge fish I drag with me
through the wilderness:
I love its glint among the dust and stones."
---Gregory Orr, "Leaving the Asylum"


"Gwendolyn Brooks Park, Topeka"
They carved the letters yellow,
and painted
the wood around the letters green,
chained a picnic table to the grass
out near where the roof of the dead
mall directs a crack
of sunset to radiate the Burger King sign gold.
Last place open after midnight:
then apartment windows hold
stars and satellites in the cold.
A creek runs like a paper fold
from one corner of park to other,
twenty or thirty blocks from where
she took her first breaths of infancy
in the only city I know of
with the letters for poet
that does not also carry
a port or a point in its name.
---Ed Skoog


"A poem, if thrown at a pane of glass, should break the glass."
---Daniil Kharms


"A few nights ago, I felt the same pull I felt the day I turned on a television, years ago, and watched the beginning of a nation sinking into something called terrorism. Daily the news would play these wars out live & daily I'd watch this new reality television this easing of violence into our consciousness muting this thing called violence numbing us to this thing once called violence now called protection. I killed my television soon after."
---Metta Sáma, "Silence: a Retreat a Meditation"


"Rain Moving In"
The blackboard is erased in the attic
And the wind turns up the light of the stars,
Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.
And if somewhere in this great planet
The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,
It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one
Will be better for it, but things can't get any worse.
Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step
Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see
It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires
Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial had been set
And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living
Conspires with it, now that this is our home:
A place to be from, and have people ask about.
---John Ashbery


"I feel like all the work is collaborative work, it's just that it comes out under an individual name so the other people you’re in collaboration with are subordinated in a certain kind of way to one's own name, even though all of those voices are constantly with you and in your head. There's a customarily solitary practice of orchestrating or organizing all those voices in a particular way, but I think now what I'd like to do is just not even be involved in that solitary practice of composing, or arranging. I mean there's always an element, however illusory, of working by yourself, which takes the form of practicing in that sense that, you know, a piano player would practice alone, but then the actual practice that you're practicing for, so to speak, is in the ensemble, in the encounter."
---Fred Moten