"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Repost: 25 Famous Authors’ Poetic Descriptions of Paris

 
by Alison Nastasi
July 14, 2013
 
Happy Bastille Day! It’s the 224th anniversary of the storming of the famous Paris prison, which helped dismantled France’s repressive monarchy. If you can’t dance along the Champs-Élysées, but want to spread the Parisian pride, head past the jump for a few eloquent and adoring words from famous writers that celebrate the City of Light.
 
Image credit: Ernest Hemingway Collection.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
Ernest Hemingway
 
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
 
“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”
 
“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”
 
Charles Dickens
 
“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”
 
Henry James
 
“The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one’s life here exactly as one pleases… there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.”
 
“Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.”
 
Honoré de Balzac
 
“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”
 
Victor Hugo
 
“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”
 
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Oscar Wilde
 
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”
 
Willa Cather
 
“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”
 
Harriet Beecher Stowe
 
“At last I have come into a dreamland.”
 
Katherine Anne Porter
 
“Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time.”
 
Henry Miller
 
“When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”
 
Gaston Leroux
 
“In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.”
 
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Gertrude Stein
 
“Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.”
 
“America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.”
 
Anaïs Nin
 
“Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.”
 
“In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive. Here it seems everyone is pretending not to see, hear, or look too intently. The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness. Overtones are missing. Relationships seem impersonal and everyone conceals his secret life, whereas in Paris it was the exciting substance of our talks, intimate revelations and sharing of experience.”
 
Katherine Mansfield
 
“I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.”
 
Edmund White
 
“Paris… is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.”
 
Allen Ginsberg
 
“You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”
 
 
Alexandre Dumas
 
“I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.”
 
Jean Cocteau
 
“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.”
 
Friedrich Nietzsche
 
“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.”
 
James Thurber
 
“The whole of Paris is a vast university of art, literature and music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything”
 
Molière
 
“Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.”
 
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners.”
 
Angela Carter
 
“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
 
James Joyce
 
“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.”
 
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
 
“Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.”
 
François Villon
 
“Good talkers are only found in Paris.”


 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

The Poetry of Lisel Mueller


Things


What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
... the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.





Why We Tell Stories

1

Because we used to have leaves
And on damp days
Our muscles feel a tug,
Painful now, from when roots
Pulled us into the ground
And because our children believe
They can fly, an instinct retained
From when the bones in our arms
Were shaped like zithers and broke
Neatly under their feathers
And because before we had lungs
We knew how far it was to the bottom
As we floated open-eyed
Like painted scarves through scenery
Of dreams, and because we awakened
And learned to speak

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
And because we were poor, we made up a tale
About a treasure mountain
That would open only for us
And because we were always defeated,
We invented impossible riddles
Only we could solve,
Monsters only we could kill,
Women who could love no one else
And because we had survived
Sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
We discovered bones that rose
From the dark earth and sang
As white birds in trees

3

Because the story of our life
Becomes our life
Because each of us tells
The same story but tells it differently
And none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
Want to enchant the children
And grandfathers need to convince us
What happened happened because of them
And though we listen only
Haphazardly, with one ear,
We will begin our story
With the word and