Gleanings from My Readings

“The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader is obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right.”


“Poetry is made of the grandeur that is available to a man with no fortune but with somewhere to walk to and ears to hear and a mind to transport him.” ---Garrison Keillor

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“Often the words that we don’t—that we can’t—say are among the most potent. And to limit the tools an artist can use cheats society of potential truth telling. We might think of art as a special circumstance where the normal rules of decorum need not apply so long as the work produced justifies the outrage it incites. . . . the truth is the world is rough, and we cannot hope to educate everyone to our own standards for civilization. Art . . . has to engage the world honestly to be effective.” ---Philip Martin, columnist

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“Writing is a way of processing reality.” --Jeanne Murray Walker, poet

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“Philosophy and religion do not deal with different questions, though they give different answers and in different terms.”

“It is not that this is the best answer to existence; it is the only answer. That is why we may hold our Christianity with intellectual integrity. The only answer for what exists is that God, the infinite-personal God, really is there.”
---Francis A. Schaeffer, in He Is There And He Is Not Silent

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“To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct apprehension of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition.”

“No, I will use no dagger! I will unfold a tale!— . . . With this engine, this little pen, I defeat all his machinations . . .”
---William Godwin, in Caleb Williams

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From Barbara Hamby’s poem “Ode to American English”:

“I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought in Brentano’s on the Avenue de l’Opéra
is any indication, too cultured by half.” (1-6)

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Happy reading!