Everything is Against Poetry

I asked a man working at the co-op if this was where canned chipotle peppers would be. He said, "Yes," (and as I walked away I thought, THAT was a nice voice.)

and

The first page of Paulo Coelho's new book Aleph. It is exactly what I need.





Not turning on the radio on the way to soccer because I was singing a new song that I finished writing yesterday.













Giving my dad bus directions for a co-worker who wants to take the bus downtown.




Bill Moyers: "He says this is a favorable time for poetry when everything is against it. What do you think he means that everything is against it and therefore it is a favorable time?"

Christian Wiman: "I think what he must mean is that, everything seems to be aligned against the kind of inner life that poetry requires, against the kind of consciousness that poetry requires.

The world seems to be going faster and faster, and our attention seems to be more and more fragmented in these various ways and threatening the inner life, and what I would say is that poetry is a bulwark against these things. That I think people realize in the midst of all this that they need some way of putting up resistance to it and reading a poem can be an act of resistance because it can be an act of individual consciousness in this onslaught of information that is coming at us."



(From Bill Moyers and Company, Feb. 24, 2012)