nonfiction: results 25–46 of 46

Poetry, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but in a different order: the first age of poetry being the age of iron; the second, of gold; the third, of silver; and the fourth, of brass.

Let observers observe the blue sky not only in winter when the earth is covered with snow, but in summer when it is covered with dark green foliage. This will help to unravel the complicated phenomena in question.

My nickname at school is Tony the All-Night Pony. When I read a poem that I like I will write it down in one of my black leather journals.

Medicine is of all the arts the most noble…

I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask—

Since you've got a girl thats a friend, I haven't heard much of anything from you and had assumed you dead until Toni mentioned something about vancouver…

You say you are learning how to ask for things. I am learning how to do the things I ask for—

Begin to confuse, to confess, your stories with the stories of someone else, stories you were told there, that you were there to hear.

Dear Mom and Dad. We fly to Lima, Peru on Tues. Everyone says the airport there is the worst in the world and guarantees we'll get robbed. So, we're keeping our passports in our undies…

here is one thought enough to kill me—I have been well, healthy, alert, &c, walking with her—and now—the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture…

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures.

Security alerts are not a western phenomenon; Seoul declared one yesterday. As of yet, they haven't given it a color, but when they do, I suspect it won't be pink.

…but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it…

I have an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on any certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it—untill it becomes stale—but when will it do so? Never…

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not…

Winter on the open seas is a grueling affair. Sometimes, the nets I haul up have turned to ice. I know this because the fish have begun to talk again. They say it was so cold…

History's typecast of "the mother" breeds thoughts of the bored housewife, entertaining herself with embroidery, pastel aprons, and flip hairdos. Herstory relates a more honest and complex definition of the mother, much like the work of Beth Ann Fennelly's poems in Tender Hooks.

The first time I saw prostitutes walking their track I was in my early twenties.

The outside is the inside in poetry and the poem.

It is hard to sum up the career of Fred Chappell. The Los Angeles Times wrote of Fred, "Not since James Agee and Robert Penn Warren has a southern writer displayed such masterful versatility," and I guess that'll have to do.

In the dark early morning of a heavy snow there is the sound of metal against rock, a scraping, low at first but relentless, insinuating. It worms itself into my dream, insisting that I awake. Outside it is dark but I can make out the figure of a man with a shovel.

Why remember? Why recount at family gatherings embarrassing, exciting, terrifying, painful events? Why tell tales of great-grandpa so-and-so who ranched a remote valley in the mountains against incredible odds, or of a grandma who ate bread and dog gravy during the Great Depression?