Be free of the need

Be free of the need to worship either the presence or the lack.

Is it divine

Is it divine to divide?

How many poems

How many poems must I write before I become unassailable?

Forever relevant

Why does everyone I meet stay forever relevant? In this I may be most different from the contingent.

(And pity)

View with suspicion (and pity) the one who has not been lonely in a crowd or spent considerable time contented with his own company.

Gesturing

Go not where I have gone, but in the direction I am gesturing toward.

Who has not?

I have wasted my life, you say. But who has not wasted his life?

New poems

+30

Do not understand poetry too well

Do not understand poetry too well or it will turn into words and practices and be lost to you forever.

Preference

Give me any modernist over a hundred vague and yammering 21st-century poets!

On poetry

Poetry isn’t only about rhyme, meter, or imagery. It’s about how language arranges thought, perception, and affect in a compressive, resonant way.

Made to be

The temple was made to be desecrated.

Surely

The purpose of life, surely, is to provide a venue for dreams.

Not entirely

The set of the inoffensive is not entirely contiguous with the set of the unoffending.

It is impossible

It is impossible to not hate death unless you are dead.

Seems wrong

The right seems wrong to the wrong. Even the wrong say so.

We don't belong

We don't belong where we have come from, and we don't belong where we have arrived.

No one could have imagined

No one could have imagined what the lack of imagination would cost us.

New poems

+30

More and more (Hollis)

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

James Hollis