are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you--how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that particular moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions."
--Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?"


"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, not power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."
--Arundhati Roy


"a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say"
--Italo Calvino, "Why Read the Classics"


"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."
--Vladimir Nabokov


"Chapel Perilous"
Darkness surrounds me; I kneel down here as my world unknits.
Pain reminds me I'm still alive, so I hold on to it
as I hold on to my drawn blade as my life slides along the edge:
between cracked stones it finds the earth to whom I made my pledge.

I am a naked blade, no sheath to hold me safe:
I have been drawn and now I must act.
Where is the wielder's hand? Where is the enemy?
Who now remembers the pact?

The chapel is empty; all unkempt the barren vessels.
There are no saints in evidence; there are no miracles,
so I kneel before the altar, chant my prayers in failing voice
because I have been chosen: because I have no choice.

I am a naked knight: no shield protects my soul.
I have been sworn and I must fulfill.
Where is my hope and faith? Where is the light to come,
when now the day never will?

What I believed is done in an unwilling suspension.
I have fallen between the cracks in God's attention.
so I turn from the altar and I look to the path beyond,
wrap my light around me, and quietly move on.
--Leigh Ann Hussey


"Ditty of First Desire"
In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.
--Federico Garcia Lorca


"Death, the Last Visit"
Hearing a low growl in your throat, you'll know that it's started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say,
and it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long
as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you'll smell mud and hair
and water.

You'll taste your mother's sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you'd spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you'll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you as you
like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you'll scream give it to me give it to me
until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last
someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won't ever
come undone.

Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you'll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt
this good.
--Marie Howe


"The Unfinished Suicides of My High School Sweetheart"
For Jake

We were platonic high school sweethearts that fucked in the front seat
without touching and with our eyes open the whole time.
Our questions locked at the genitals like children to bicycles.
Our distant tongues sparked like forks dreaming of sockets.
We were virgin high school sweethearts that fucked with the seatbelts on
and the headlights blazing, daring passing drivers to stop and peek,
challenging cops to pull over beside us and question how safe our conversation was.

We theorized about masturbation, weed, (and the combination), football players,
our parents, Bone Thugs' rapping techniques,
and what percentage of wrong was it to think of someone else while getting head.

We could achieve orgiastic ecstasy on a pile of purple sweatpants.
Our bodies fit together without being in one another.
We were music.
We were honest.
And that is something World Leaders are too scared to touch.
And we got angry. We got scared.
And we weren't enough for each other.
And we were lovers.

It's true: you were a man and I was a woman and the birds didn't care,
and the bees stung the both of us,
but the level of intimacy made slobbering couples at school seem like
they had the attention spans of goldfish.
We were Red Rock meets blue sky of Arizona boldness,
depth of mountains the color of dried blood.

You told me you wanted to die.
Parked outside my parents' house, asked what kept me living.
I told you my brother's name but you only had sisters.

You said it would be easy.
One acquaintance away from getting a gun.
Knew someone who knew someone.
You were inches from releasing your feet from under the rope around your neck
and I was there, and I wasn't.
You were scattered to red needles across the sheet of your chest
and you were only a decision away from a vertical slice
that opened the drawers of blood inside you until you were empty.

How could I tell you: you never wear sunglasses and I like that about you.
You look like a muppet and that alone still makes me smile.
You are curious yet patient.
You never make me feel ugly, gendered or crazy and that is huge.
This is friendship I keep in a drawer I will never unhinge
and spill out.

I felt you tremor from across the cup-holder
as a closed door on the left side of your chest rattled,
which must have been frightening
because the days were all empty rooms you waited in,
and the women were laughter that lived outside your walls,
and the men were impossible to be.

Jake, you look at me like I belong only in my skin,
and you ask questions, which is the biggest compliment anyone can receive.

So in the car we're constantly in, outside our parents' houses,
I swallow your keys to prove my commitment to finding a new way,
another road, a life you can live with.
--Shira Erlichman


"Survivor"
A jay on the fence preaches to a
squirrel. I watch the squirrel quiver,
the way squirrels do--its whole
body flickers. I'm not sure why this
reminds me of when I was five and

something died in our drain spout.
Feather or fur, I watched my father
dig it out, knowing (as a child knows)
how much life matters. I have seen how
easily autumn shakes the yellow leaves,

how winter razes the shoals of heaven.
I have felt love's thunder and moan, and
had my night on the wild river. I have
heard the cancer diagnosis with my name
in it. I know what mercy is and isn't.

Morning breaks from sparrows' wings
(life's breezy business), and I'm still here,
still in love with the sorrows, the joys--
days like this, measured by memory, the
ticking crickets, the pulse in my wrist.
--Adele Kenny


"3."
(first line by John Ashbery)

we thought the sky would melt to see us
that stars would ash and plea please empty us

we thought at the very least the moon
would stay still and quit trying to flee us

you were unhinged and suddenly squealing
you drowned and said we could no longer be us

this year's horses are wild unbroken
these birds are lame and unharmonious

you tore up notes my sudden verses
while I believed I would somehow free us
--Denver Butson, from "Drowning Ghazals"


"Ripples on New Grass"
When all this is over, said the princess,
this bothersome growing up, I'll live with wild horses.
I want to race tumbleweed blowing down a canyon
in Wyoming, dip my muzzle in a mountain tarn.

I intend to learn the trails of Ishmael and Astarte
beyond blue ridges where no one can get me,
find a bird with a pearl inside, heavy as ten copper coins,

track the luminous red wind that brings thunder
and go where ripples on new grass shimmer
in a hidden valley only I shall know.

I want to see the autumn swarms of monarch butterflies,
saffron, primrose, honey-brown, blue sapphire skies,
on their way to the Gulf: a gold skein
over the face of Ocean, calling all migrants home.
--Ruth Padel


"Meditation at Five Islands"
There is no help for it after all,
nothing to keep one’s unlived lives
from dragging their heavy chains
along the bottom of the sea,
full fathom five and so forth.
The heart wants what it wants,
which is everything. The brine
air and the hundred-year firs
and the secret music cupped
in the polished nothing of a shell.
There is no way to feel in the hand
the solid mass of the life one has
lived, to know what it is. There is
only the walk down to the shore
and the stones held in the palm,
and only the sea to look to, as far
as one can, which is only so far.
--Dave Lucas


"The Naming"
Lie back, says the unexpected scent of rain-battered lilac that enters
through the open window like rescue, rising above

the sulfur, exhaust, the recently spread mulch. Its branches stir
in the mind, the sound anticipating the footsteps

that soon untether the bedroom's dark, when I sense the dominating
shape of his weight on the mattress just before his

words ghost the sweet, freighted air around my waiting hear. He says,
I want to name every part of you, I want to say what

I am going to do, then do it, but I don't want you to move a muscle.
Yes is only a caught breath I am helpless against.

Of course, I let his voice twist itself into the silk of a necktie he
knots around my eyes, then into rope for the wrists

to restrain any lingering shame. Each silence before the answering
touch, each stillness before his voice resumes becomes

a perdition the body slides willingly into, as when asking for
forgiveness you don't need to come. It is only then,

during one of those half-moments of agony and absolute
nothingness, that I believe, I do want to believe

that a single man in a garden could have named it all, relishing
the lilt of leaf, limb, skin. Saying, Let me.

Needing that control.
--James Crews


"It Could Happen to Anyone, or a Letter to the Boy"
The man in the shack on the corner wants
to kiss you. He remembers when you jump-roped
better than most of the girls & prayed without
manly pretense, remembers how you mimicked
the church mothers--knees & body bowed, Lawd
--your genuine contrition for being broken
& breakable still. You always was too pretty
to be a boy. Come gimme some sugar, he says
& reaches out to kiss you on your cheek, but
his lips are thistles, his face a cavern of bones.
It's World AIDS Day, & you are here to chronicle
his free-fall from engineer to blind man leading
the myope, to fevers that flash on & off like a switch
spooked by the God he calls great & merciful
with a smile. Your mother says his songs tore up
church services all over town like hurricanes
had done Old U.S. Road: dogwoods splayed,
naked limbs convulsing, rapt in holy water,
like the saints slain by the spirits he conjured.
You don't remember him, so busy kneeling
at the altar of this you the mothers & sanctified brothers
could praise, who loved Shirts Against Skins
more than Bible study, loved tackling the most buff Skin
on the field, who always held you on top of him long
enough for you to feel him hardening against you
hardening. Gimme some skin, nigga, he'd say
& grin, as you pulled away, then reached to pull
him to his feet. This man doesn't know the you
who dreamed of kissing the lead tuba player
but was too much of a punk or a saint or both
to follow his leer from the dais to the bathroom stall.
It could happen to anyone, he says, especially
when you love somebody. Make sure
you write that down. You don't. Too
sentimental, you think, for a hard
news story, so you dig for the grit, for the who
who branded him untouchable. He smiles,
places one hand on his chest, gropes the table
for yours. You using protection with these boys?
His scaly palm grazes your keloid knuckles.
I haven't, you know, yet, you mumble, happy
for once to be numb, glad you can’t feel the heat.
--L. Lamar Wilson


"Kisses"
All the kisses I've ever been given, today I feel them on my mouth.
And my knees feel them, the reckless ones placed there
through the holes in my jeans while I sat on a car hood
or a broken sofa in somebody's basement, stoned, the way I was
in those day, still amazed that boys and even men would want to
lower their beautiful heads like horses drinking from a river and taste me.
The back of my neck feels them, my hair swept aside to expose the nape,
and my breasts tingle the way they did when my milk came in after the birth,
when I was swollen, and sleepless, and my daughter fed and fed until I pried
her from me and laid her in her crib. Even the chaste kisses that brushed
my cheeks, the fatherly ones on my forehead, I feel them rising up from underneath
the skin of the past, a delicate, roseate rash; and the ravishing ones, God,
I think of them and the filaments in my brain start buzzing crazily and flare out.
Every kiss is here somewhere, all over me like a fine, shiny grit, like I'm a pale
fish that's been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour,
slid down into a deep skillet, into burning. Today I know I've lost no one.
My loves are here: wrists, eyelids, damp toes, all scars, and my mouth
pouring praises, still asking, saying kiss me; when I'm dead kiss this poem,
it needs you to know it goes on, give it your lovely mouth, your living tongue.
--Kim Addonizio


"Cyclops"
You, going along the path,
mosquito-doped, with no moon, the flashlight
a single orange eye

unable to see what is beyond
the capsule of your dim
sight, what shape

contracts to a heart
with terror, bumps
among the leaves, what makes
a bristling noise like a fur throat

Is it true you do not wish to hurt them?

Is it true you have no fear?
Take off your shoes then,
let your eyes go bare,
swim in their darkness as in a river

do not disguise
yourself in armour.

They watch you from hiding:
you are a chemical
smell, a cold fire, you are
giant and indefinable

In their monstrous night
thick with possible claws
where danger is not knowing,

you are the hugest monster.
--Margaret Atwood


"XVII"
No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us;
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.
--Adrienne Rich


"Song"
Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat's head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat's headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped....
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night's bush of stars, because the goat's silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train's horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn't hear the train's horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat's body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles
At the goat's torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke....
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn't know was that the goat's head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn't know
Was that the goat's head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.
--Brigit Pegeen Kelly


Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
--Rumi


"One seed of humanity upon the burnt earth of inhumanity...will a forest find. There is only one devil. Do not be afraid of yourself."
--Rickie Lee Jones

"Restless sinner, rest in sin
He's got no face to hold him in
He feels his days dark as night
He's been hiding with the blind
Just to find a place to hide his ghost"
--Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, "Restless Sinner"


"Beware of those angels with their wings glued on."
--Billy Corgan


"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
--Philip K. Dick


"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."
--Marilyn Monroe


"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."
--Socrates


"It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. It's like a kind of poetry."
--Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider


"Everything passes, everything breaks, everything wearies."
--French proverb


"In case you never noticed, the path you never chose has chosen you."
--Jason Mraz


"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
--Richard Bach


"Tell me what you've come here for
Moving like a hunter through my back door
Leaving the perfume of all you adore
To die nameless on my floor"
--Poe, "Wild"


"Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad."
--Diogenes


"Cast me gently
Into morning
For the night has been unkind
Take me to a
Place so holy
That I can wash this from my mind
The memory of choosing not to fight"
--Sarah McLachlan, "Answer"


"You thought by now you'd be
So much better than you are
You thought by now they'd see
That you have come so far

"And the pride inside their eyes
It's synchronized to a love you'll never know
So much more than you've been shown

"Hold on, one more time with feeling
Try it again, breathing's just a rhythm
Say it in your mind until you know
That the words are right
This is why we fight"
--Regina Spektor, "One More Time with Feeling"


"I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

"Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?

"Do you carry every sadness with you?
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you

"A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking

"So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us

"But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper

"That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home"
--Hem, "Half Acre"


"We hang our gods from trees."
--Janet Fitch


"I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious, yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless."
--Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre


"I am not concerned that you have fallen; I am concerned that you arise."
--Abraham Lincoln


"I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man alive."
--Henry Miller


"But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever"
--Queen, "Who Wants to Live Forever"


"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
--James M. Barrie, Peter Pan


"What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens."
--Ursula K. Le Guin


"Every heart to love will come
But like a refugee"
--Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"


"And all who told it added something new,
And all who heard it made enlargements too."
--Alexander Pope


"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
--Steve Jobs


"There is no eraser on the end of a scalpel."
--Douglas Leonard Martin


"A person could only howl in abandonment so many times. Time didn't age you; memory did."
--Richard Powers


"What is a crow but a dove dipped in pitch? And what is a man but a dog cursed with words?"
--David Benioff


"Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust."
--Emily Dickinson


"The shadow is an archetype, meaning that it exists in all of us. The shadow contains everything denied and despised, everything considered sinful and everything we find awkward or unnerving. Although the shadow is thought of as the dark side of the individual it should be noted that it could also contain undeveloped positive parts."
--Kevin Wilson


"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
--Jonathan Swift


"I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth."
--Janeane Garofalo


"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."
--William Feather


"Whisper your name in an empty room
You brush past my skin
As soft as fur"
--The Cure, "Other Voices"


"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me, you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, 'Well, never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music' "
--Leonard Cohen, "Chelsea Hotel No. 2"


"Asparagus"

This afternoon a man leans over
the hard rolls and the curled
butter, and tells me everything: two
women love him, he loved them, what
should he do?

The sun
sifts down through the imperceptibly
brownish urban air. I'm going to
suffer for this: turn red, get
blisters or else cancer. I eat
asparagus with my fingers, he
plunges into description.
He's at his wit's end, sewed
up in his own frenzy. He has
breadcrumbs in his beard.

I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.
I could wrinkle up my eyelids,
look wise. I could get a pet lizard.
You're not crazy, I tell him.
Others have done this. Me too.
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I'm no authority
on sane living.

Which is all true
and no help at all, because
this form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
or what kind of screams and grimaces
it pushed you into.

The shrimp arrive on their skewers,
the courtyard trees unroll
their yellowy caterpillars,
pollen powders our shoulders.
He wants them both, he relates
tortures, the coffee
arrives, and altogether I am amazed
at his stupidities.

I sit looking at him
with a sort of wonder,
or is it envy?
Listen, I say to him,
you're very lucky.
--Margaret Atwood


"Up in the sky there are a thousand stars we might see in our lifetime. Circuses circling fathoms of infinite seas, in dimensions we will never catch in the corner of our eye, on great caravans of reflected light and hope. I once saw a painting called The Equestrian in the Circus of the Falling Star. That is where I see Laura Nyro now, where I keep her, where she can work and be as wild as she is.

"The teenaged genius, she runs through subways unharmed by the bad people who hide there, and she never grows old. Eroticism; she's there like Joan of Arc. No pseudo sex queen could even approach the sensuality that Laura brought with a couple chords and a Chinese lamp. Let the boys and girls grow their own new sexuality from the intoxicating leaves of these times, these hippies and greasers and socis."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"I never met [Laura Nyro], except through her music. It's not that I think about her much in these years; I don't. But I don't need to. Mythological creatures are part of us. And I suspect it is the metaphysical clay of her intention that I work with.

"So there she is, horse bound, twirling in the cosmos, made of the purple lipstick that only defiant tenderness can bear. All that color, all that eternal burning, all that practice after school.

"Against the backdrop of time, perhaps nothing less than genius after all--genius being a thing that resonates deeper than its time, that cannot be denied by its creator, that, measured against time, was a courageous and unexpected use of tools; and measured against history, has no relevance to any time but now. The pretty folk singers and the angry acid queens, the guitar slingers and the soul groups, none of it translated with its original power into the coming decades. But this artist is still intact, and when you listen to those old recordings, you cannot help but hear the voice, like any great voice, Miles or Kubrick or Dylan Thomas, not only a great decade, but a great soul. Laura Nyro, singer and songwriter.

"And this is the gift, you know, inspired from within. It is not what she did but what she was. Where I can discern the truly divine among us, those brushed for a moment by God's little watercolor. What they do is amazing, yes, but it is because of what they are that the work is profound.

"Why is 'Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp' such an amazing work? Because it is being generated by a spirit wholly bent on love, on bringing love to the listener. I believe that now. I knew the song; it made me dream and made me hope. But now, growing old, I see that the intention of the writer was the thing that made the song live. In performance, the writer tells us many layers more than the music or the lyric can. If the writer is a performer, a great interpreter, like Laura, the inflection and movement reveal that meaning that cannot be spoken, but is understood by most of the people who witness it."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"We who were a little homely or a little stunningly beautiful for our oddness were proud of our having been cool enough to have heard [Laura Nyro]. Most people did not know who she was, and recognition of this secret in common, this was a bond between strangers."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"I liked [Laura Nyro's] name, and that she came from New York City, that strange other world, where West Side Story came from. Living on a farm in Elma, Washington, a small town where I was outcast absolute, it helped me to survive just knowing that somewhere in the universe there was someone with that beautiful name, Laura Nyro, and people cared about her, and there was a city where she walked and the wind lifted her hair.

"The wind lifted her hair for some magical moment on the cover of New York Tendaberry, my first Laura record, and for me, her greatest work. She was not afraid to show you her strange face, and you could tell she was very comfortable with her body. Something as small as that, something as simple as 'Look at me, I am different, see me' can be ingested instantly and change you in a small way, a way that one day might become very large indeed. All of these simple gestures we do seep into and carve the people we meet. Every photograph, every thing, it is part of telling people who we are, part of the great word of God that we speak."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"There is still a lot to sing and write about, to heal the spirit and encourage the revolution among our people. Poverty in the United States in this new millennium is a sin that more than one President will have to account for when his time is up. Laura Nyro inspires that kind of thinking in me. I want to stand by the people in my nation and help us all rise. I can't say how, I only know that these songs, these songs of freedom, and their writers, are my teachers and companions."
--Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro: Lyrics and Reminisces


"A great thing, when we used to be on the bus, was [Laura Nyro] would always say, 'Do you think we could live here?' This is how family-oriented she was about the band. It didn't matter--whatever town we were in, it was almost as if she would love it if the whole band just lived in a house and we were a family."
--Jimmy Vivino, guitarist and Laura Nyro bandleader


"I'm going to paraphrase a story that I think is quintessential Laura. Have you come across Roscoe Harring? He was an early member of the Fifth Avenue Band. He went on to be a road manager for John Sebastian, Laura's road manager and Laura's manager. He was even a co-producer on the Smile record. Roscoe told a story at the service for Laura after her death. This is quintessential Laura. Laura played Wolman Skating Rink in Central Park at what was called the Schaeffer Music Festival. She showed up for sound check in the middle of the afternoon. The show was to start at 7:00. She goes up on the stage and goes, 'Oh my goodness, this is way too high. Roscoe, can you have them lower the stage? It's just too far from the people.' Roscoe looks at Laura and in a gentle, managerial way, says, 'Laura, this festival is running all summer. It's taken weeks to create all this. I just don't think there is any way they can lower the stage.' She takes a beat or two and she looks at Roscoe and she says, 'Well, can we bring the people up?' That is Laura all the way."
--Peter Gallway, producer of Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro (Tribute album)