ModPo

January 17, 2013 Photo by John Williams The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true sp...

He bought the Sunday New York Times on the day before his 65th birthday. as an act of self-conscious generosity, On the day after his birthday he was still making his way through  the lead article in the Book Review on Bellow. “Why was it taking so long?” He wondered. He could read less than one four-column page  before the suffocating avalanche of words rolled him. It wasn’t that the names being dropped: Hemingway – Heidegger were scratchings on a stranger’s tombstone. He  knew these writers, knew being and he knew time, knew  the “thumb against her nipple” man and the  the stupefying languor of gulf island heat. He saw quite clearly the chair, the room, the university town  where he had met the Nazi at a place arranged by Englishman John Macquarrie. The not unkind face of his college roommate appeared to him, throwing a new blue gray,  soft cover copy of Herzog on their shared desk in 1969.  Familiarity was not the problem. Other titles surfaced...