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and I by Karoline Kroiss

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and you by Karoline Kroiss

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me by Karoline Kroiss

Young Poets

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Nicanor Parra

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Poet

The wind dying, I find a city deserted, except for crowds of
people moving and standing.
 
 
    Those standing resemble stories, like stones, coal from the
death of plants, bricks in the shape of teeth.
 
 
    I begin now to write down all the places I have not been—
starting with the most distant.
 
 
    I build houses that I will not inhabit.

Keith Waldrop

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A Writer’s Ink by Norman Duenas

Measure

Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates  
again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer  
and sunset, the peace  
of the writing desk

and the habitual peace  
of writing, these things  
form an order I only

belong to in the idleness  
of attention. Last light  
rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse  
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree  
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

Robert Hass

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

Denise Levertov

"I want to write one true sentence. […] If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I’ll be satisfied."

Paula McLain | The Paris Wife

"It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, cross currents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many."

Margaret Atwood | The Handmaid’s Tale

Lesson by camerafool

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keep in touch by Leslie Graff

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Prayer of the Muse by Darya Krupkina

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Everything starts with the pen

There they were, facsimiles of Nelson Mandela’s letters and his memoirs in his own, elegant, slightly angular hand, published last week.

“Holographs: documents written in the author’s own hand,” says the dictionary. But the dictionary doesn’t mention that as well as guaranteeing authenticity (what guarantees that now? A PIN number?) holographs, such as Mandela’s elegant, slightly spiky hand, can be powerfully moving.

And what about little Tony Blair? He did it too: wrote his very own memoirs with his very own pen. A fountain pen! With actual ink! Go into a shop now, ask for ink – they look at you as though you’d suggested exposing yourself. Which perhaps you had: as a dinosaur.