great blake things

Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet
This is not Done by Jostling in the Street.

William Blake

poetry and parking

The jewel-like words of poets and city parking garages generally don't have much in common, unless you're leaving your car at 201 West Madison in Chicago, also known as the Poetry Garage. Here while you're off on an urban adventure, your vehicle waits on garage levels dedicated specifically to poets like Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg, the man who conjured up visions of Chicago fog and little cat feet. You still have to pay for the parking, of course, but it's a much more aesthetic experience and probably easier to remember that you parked your PT Cruiser up with W.H. Auden -- instead of just somewhere on Level 3.

(Pictured: Calliope, muse of poetry and The Poetry Garage; painting by Cesare Dandini, 1595-1658)

national poetry month!

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too....

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there-
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom....

(From "To Be in Love" -- Gwendolyn Brooks)(Pictured: Cardinalis cardinalis, Wikimedia Commons)

national poetry month!

Some spiders spin webs as beautiful
As Japanese drawings, intricate as clocks, strong as rocks:
Others construct traps which consist only
Of two sticky and tricky threads. Yet this ambush is enough
To bind and chain a crawling ant for long
enough:
The famished spider feels the vibration
Which transforms patience into sensation and satiation.


from Spiders -- Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) (Pictured: The Smiling Spider -- Odilon Redon)

national poetry month!

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time...
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

olden days

Awaking from a dream
I grieve.
My sleep no more is so peaceful
As in the olden days.

Words: Ishikawa Takuboku (1885-1912)

Image: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, #45. The Yoroi Ferry (Hiroshige, ca. 1856)

[If you're able to donate, please help Japan through this horrible crisis and give whatever funds you can to the American Red Cross or other reputable charitable organizations.]

sun moon solstice

Since today is the longest day of the year, pictured is Robert Delaunay's 1912 Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (Museum of Modern Art). Happy summer solstice!

taxi driver

When I drive cab
I am the hunter.
My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures

When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air....

Taxi Suite, Lew Welch (1926-1971)

(Pictured: The City from Greenwich Village, 1922 -- John Sloan, National Gallery of Art)

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.

Sylvia Plath, Journals

vegetable loves

My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow. (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

Pictured: Vegetable Still-Life -- Frans Snyders, ca. 1600

oak park moments

This quote (sort of) etched in stone by Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese was glimpsed at Oak Park's Eastgate Cafe, which even seems like a place where you might have once found Cesare Pavese drinking coffee and contemplating life. His first name is off by one small letter but otherwise those are definitely his words. Oak Park is well-known for former citizens Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, but another Oak Parker worth noting is Philander Barclay. Philander rode his bicycle around the town back in the early 20th century and left behind a cultural and historical legacy of close to a thousand photographs of Oak Park as it was then. Click here  to read more about Philander, and here  to see some of his photographs.

dr. williams

Today would have been the birthday of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), the doctor and poet who lived and practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey for most of his days, when he wasn’t sneaking over to Manhattan or points thereabout to consort with other creative minds. Williams gave us the rain-glazed red wheelbarrow and the white chickens, and the great opening line of “To Elsie” -- The pure products of America go crazy....

Williams has always been one of my favorites among the dead poets' society, and if you ever have a chance to read his autobiography, it offers an interesting glimpse of what it was like to attend medical school in the early 20th century. And these Renoir plums are in honor of Williams' so-sweet, so-cold icebox ones from "This is Just to Say."