I keep forgetting the Writer’s
Almanac, which surprises me because every time NewMexiKen reminds me to visit it, I find much to
enjoy and too many things I’d like to quote. Go see for yourself, but here are few from this week.mjh
”I wanted safety in blue
distance, illimitable, uninhabited. I wanted … the grandeur of free solitude.” and ”Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random
ebullience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.” — naturalist and writer Donald Culross Peattie
My book is
an open life / …
Until something transcendent turns up
I plash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused
— Having Come This
Far by James Broughton
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over
the roof
— It is Marvellous by Elizabeth Bishop
It rained all of some hundredths of an inch yesterday (12 drops at my
house), a technicality ‘ending‘ our 5th longest stretch without measurable rain. Better than nothing — truly so, no matter how
close to nothing it seems. mjh
See the poem, “The Vacuum,” by Howard Nemerov.
And let us all remember and
celebrate George Orwell (born Eric Blair) on his birthday, Friday, 6/25 (1903). mjh
”Every line of
serious work that I have written [since the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.”
”The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns …
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
”If liberty means anything at all, it
means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”