Tag: Literature

That old September feeling

Live & Learn13 Comments

angle of repose - wallace stegner

“That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air… Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

By one my favorite authors from one of my favorite books, the Pulitzer Prize Winning Angle of Repose.

Quote Source: Stalwart Reader. Find book on Amazon here.

It’s time to move on. Autumn must come.

Live & Learn36 Comments

birds-sun-sky

With overripe berries
and the last margin of wildflowers
and gauzy-winged dragonflies
skimming a creek
into shimmering rings
above minnows as bright as dimes,
our world seems splendid, immutable.
Leaf by leaf
the stream is laced
with green going to yellow and red
twirling from a colonnade of trees,
down on strips of light.
Near water urging over mossy rubble,
it’s hard to accept it’s all ending.
Parents have died and children are leaving.
Even the birds
ounce their singing,
begin flitting
to cover for night.
And under the late glow of sun,
every place whispers
that it’s time to move on,
that autumn must come
autumn must come,
must come.

—Claude Wilkinson, closing lines to “Summer’s End,” from Joy in the Morning: Poems

Sources/Credits: Photograph-Thank you Andy’s Photography. Poem-Thank You A Poet Reflects and Google Books

A life lived well is never wasted

Live & Learn17 Comments

Marilynne-Robinson

Lori, LouAnn and Sandy Sue inspired me to read books written by Natalie Goldberg following my share last month.  So I dove into the Long Quiet Highway and came across this passage early in her book.

“Often when you take on the voice of a great writer, speak his or her words aloud, you are taking on the voice of inspiration, you are breathing their breath at the moment of their heightened feelings, that what all writers ultimately do is pass on their breath.”

I paused and reflected on the “great” writers that I have read.  Marilynne Robinson immediately came to mind.  She has the ability to transport me to another place and time – – writing with such grace, such beauty and such humanity.  She’s won literary “hardware” for her three major novels.

  • Housekeeping. Nominated for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction novel.
  • Gilead. Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and winner of the National Book Circle Critics Award for Fiction.
  • Home. Winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction award.

Soon after I read Goldberg’s thoughts on great writers, I came this excerpt from a Chicago Tribune article shared at Lit Verve  where the writer asks Robinson about Rev. John Ames, a congregational minister in Gilead, Iowa and the main character in her novel Gilead: Continue reading “A life lived well is never wasted” →

And suddenly you know: that was enough

Live & Learn32 Comments

black and white, photography,portrait, eyes closed

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is –
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

Wiki Bio for Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).  Credits: Image by Stephan Vanfleteren. Poem: Thank you Whiskey River.

The voyage into the interior is all that matters

Live & Learn17 Comments

photography

“We’ve all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can’t sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that’s a life on the edge.”

― Charles Wright

Charles Wright, born 1935, is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and he served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”

Credits: Poem Source – Thank you Journal of a Nobody.  Photograph: thank you ojojunkie.  Bio: Poetryfoundation