Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice
by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies [...]

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Dig For Something Shiny

I’m requiring my students to keep online commonplace books. And I try to practice what I preach
So….visit Something Shiny: One Writer’s Commonplace Book.

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Still so much to conquer: E. Ethelbert Miller

Wisdom from an interview with my friend, the poet E. Ethelbert Miller:
Just when I needed reminding…
Thanks, E, and much love, much gratitude.

“But where’s the apprenticeship? And that’s the word to use: apprenticeship. Not model, not workshop, apprenticeship. The difference between an apprenticeship and a workshop is that I will sit here and take only one [...]

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“Yet the collective life, which is also us, shimmers on.” Mark Doty

“All attempts to console ourselves, I believe, are doomed, because the world is more complicated than we are. Our explanations will fail, but it is our human work to make them.”
from “Souls on Ice” by Mark Doty
I just completed an essay, about my father. It is a draft, so incredibly far from finished, more incredibly [...]

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My Father Is a Retired Magician

My Father Is a Retired Magician
by Ntozake Shange
(for ifa, p.t., & bisa)
my father is a retired magician
which accounts for my irregular behavior
everythin comes outta magic hats
or bottles wit no bottoms & parakeets
are as easy to get as a couple a rabbits
or 3 fifty cent pieces/ 1958
my daddy retired from magic & took
up another trade cuz [...]

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When my dead father comes to visit

from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]
by Claudia Rankine
Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was [...]

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I dreamt a white horse

I dreamt a friend on a white horse, all speed and laughter, so much laughter. Bide your time, he said, this is not the one. Then he lit a cigarette and grinned.
Horse’s Adventure
by Jason Bredle
The horse discovered a gateway to another
dimension, and with nothing else to do, moseyed
into it just for grins, and man, [...]

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“Here is no water but only rock” T.S. Eliot

From “What the Thunder Said”
by T. S. Eliot
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is [...]

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“I Belong There” by Mahmoud Darwish

I Belong There
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash
I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a [...]

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“For only the shadow is true” Robert Penn Warren

From “A Backward Glance” by Walt Whitman
“And it must be carefully remember’d that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own; nor do its poems. They are grown of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always curiously from elsewhere–follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best.”
From [...]

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