Lightly child, lightly

~ Live & Learn

Why is it you can have that extraordinary experience of falling violently in love with great poetry … where you are moved by its power before you comprehend it?

~ Harold Bloom, from “Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1″ in The Paris Review (Issue 118, Spring 1991)

Notes

  • Photo: landa grazioli with poetry. Quote: Thank you Hammock Papers
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

10 thoughts on “Lightly child, lightly”

  1. I was talking about this with someone at dinner last night. How few lines can be captivating. Getting few free minutes to sit in a corner away from everyone and getting to inhale few little lines can be intoxicating. Some poetry is like this. I liken it to a mirror. Yes, that’s how some poets write. It’s theirs when they write it, yours when you read it, like a mirror, it has a little bit of the reader in it everytime it’s read.

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  3. Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry rush to mind, as does Seamus Heaney — and the one whose sighs I feel bouncing off his writing paper into my face, Robert Frost. There are so many — known and unknown — who fit the description for me. Would you believe me if I said Karol Wojtyla’s poetry is like sheet lightning in word form?

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    1. Oh, “Sheet Lightening”! So love your description.

      And one of my favorites by Wojtyla:

      The Quarry:

      He wasn’t alone.
      His muscles grew into the flesh of the crowd, energy their pulse,
      As long as they held a hammer, as long as his feet felt the ground.
      And a stone smashed his temples and cut through his heart’s chamber.
      They took his body and walked in a silent line
      Toil still lingered about him, a sense of wrong.
      They wore gray blouses, boots ankle-deep in mud.
      In this, they showed the end.
      How violently his time halted: the pointers on the low voltage dials jerked, then dropped to zero again.
      White stone now within him, eating into his being,taking over enough of him to turn him into stone.
      Who will lift up that stone, unfurl his thoughts again under the cracked temples?
      So plaster cracks on the wall.
      They laid him down, his back on a sheet of gravel.
      His wife came, worn out with worry; his son returned from school
      Should his anger now flow into the anger of others?
      It was maturing in him through his own truth and love
      Should he be used by those who came after,deprived of substance, unique and deeply his own?
      The stones on the move again; a wagon bruising the flowers.
      Again the electric current cuts deep into the walls.
      But the man has taken with him the world’s inner structure,where the greater the anger, the higher the explosion of love.

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