Gleanings from My Readings

“Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate. The intense vision and high spirits and moral grandeur are simply needed lest we drift through our days consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad.”

“The last singer recognizable to everyone was Frank Sinatra, the last poet known far and wide was Robert Frost. There are no replacements in sight. Today’s celebrities are people whom most Americans haven’t heard of. Our culture—jazz, especially, and movies—once united us, a point of pride, uniquely American, but school boards are slaughtering arts education on every hand . . . children are cheated out of poetry and French and the cello—meanwhile, interscholastic football, the great passion of unhappy men, grows by leaps and bounds, and children are conditioned for the passive life in which commercial trademarks become their insignia here in the United Corporations of America.” ---Garrison Keillor

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“I wouldn’t stay here, in Germany . . . I would get to England. There I would be able to speak the language and understand the culture, with its meadows and cows, and the Queen, and Mayfair and Whitechapel—I knew it all, I thought, from books and Monopoly Games.”
---Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from her memoir Infidel

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“Every time life brings you to a crossroads, from the tiniest to the most immense, go toward love, not away from fear. Think of every choice in terms of “What would thrill and delight me?” rather than “What will keep my fear—or the events, people, and things I fear—at bay?”
---Martha Beck

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From Howard Nimerov’s poem “To David, About His Education”:

“The world is full mostly of invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out.” (1-3)

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From Erica Funkhouser’s poem “My Father’s Lunch”:

“We could see it was an old meal
with the patina of dream
going back to the first days
of bread and meat and work.” (38-41)

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Happy reading!