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| Marie Bortolotto 2020 “Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. ” - Pico Iyer - The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere |
April 28, 2020
April 21, 2020
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| Marie Bortolotto 2020 The Poet's Obligation To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or harsh prison cell; to him I come, and, without speaking or looking, I arrive and open the door of his prison, and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent, a great fragment of thunder sets in motion the rumble of the planet and the foam, the raucous rivers of the ocean flood, the star vibrates swiftly in its corona, and the sea is beating, dying and continuing. So, drawn on by my destiny, I ceaselessly must listen to and keep the sea's lamenting in my awareness, I must feel the crash of the hard water and gather it up in a perpetual cup so that, wherever those in prison may be, wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation, I may be there with an errant wave, I may move, passing through windows, and hearing me, eyes will glance upward saying "How can I reach the sea?" And I shall broadcast, saying nothing, the starry echoes of the wave, a breaking up of foam and quicksand, a rustling of salt withdrawing, the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast. So, through me, freedom and the sea will make their answer to the shuttered heart. - Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet 1904 - 1973 |
April 13, 2020
March 31, 2020
March 29, 2020
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| Marie Bortolotto 2020 Praise the mutilated world and the grey feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. - Adam Zagajewski, 1945 - Polish poet, novelist, translator “Disdain for poetry (or any form of art) reveals an interesting cultural anxiety about the space for imagination in our lives… poetry is this space where every single particle of language is charged with the most meaning.” Quote by Bob Lerner, Author 1979 - |
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| Marie Bortolotto 2020 “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” Quote by William Stafford, 1914 - 1993 American poet "Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence… Yet however it is brought into being, true concentration appears - paradoxically - at the moment willed effort drops away… At such moments, there may be some strong emotion present - feelings of joy, or even grief - but as often, in deep concentration, the self disappears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else vanish into attentiveness itself. This may explain why the creative is so often descried as impersonal and beyond self, as if inspiration were literally what its etymology implies, something “breathed in”. - from Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield, 1953-, Poet, Translator, Author |
March 26, 2020
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| Marie Bortolotto 2020 In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood — A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks — is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is — Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. |
February 28, 2020
February 23, 2020
February 17, 2020
January 21, 2020
January 1, 2020
December 30, 2019
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