Your business (Graham)

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Martha Graham

For that (Hopkins)

What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The correlation

One may cause a large amount of harm through the exercise of just a little evil, and a small amount through a great indulgence—the correlation is complex and hard to predict.

Someone will (Cameron)

Nothing is too terrible for humans to do to their fellow creatures. If a cruelty can be imagined, someone will perpetrate it.

Eleanor Cameron, The Seed and the Vision

A commitment

A love of novelty is a commitment to freedom.

On education (Gregory)

The most powerful and widespread metaphor in education is also the worst: learning is storage.

Marshall Gregory

On flaws

It is instructive to study flaws, but deadly to enshrine them.

Struck (Dillard)

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

The motive for metaphor (Oates)

What is the motive for metaphor in any poet—in any poetic sensibility—but the ceaseless defining of the self and of the world by way of language?

Joyce Carol Oates

Even acceptance

Even acceptance can be a kind of resistance.

Poems

7 new ones.

On competence

Competence is measured by success, not by effort.

On evil

Evil must be discredited, not repressed.

On madness

Is madness deviation from the norm or deviation from reality?

On democracy

To understand the limits of democracy, consider the result of a vote to keep the sun from rising.

Loot in the mailbox!

I received my prize package from the Cat Jahnke Facebook Giveaway Contest today (yes, I was a winner!). I've had her CD, The Stories Are Taking Their Toll, on repeat all day. Is it any good? Well, there's a reason she's the ONLY musician I follow on Facebook.  Check it out.

I hate an obscurantist
be he poet or priest.

Best thought for 9/11 (Dawkins)

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden.

Richard Dawkins

New poems

I've added 5.

On injustice

The perception of injustice
is the conception of justice:
all is just
before it is perceived not to be.
What injustices
have we not yet invented?

Progressives & Conservatives (Chesterton)

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

G.K. Chesterton

Poems

I've posted 8 new poems. I also recently updated the navigation for the poetry section, making sub-sections for each year that I've written at least one poem.