PolyArchive

Marginalia Billy Collins Sometimes the notes are ferocious, Skirmishes against the author Raging along the borders of every page In tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments […]

Infirmity Theodore Roethke In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; […]

pity this busy monster, manunkind E. E. Cummings pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness –electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of […]

Ulysses (1833) Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson(1809–92) It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink […]

…Among those “enemies” prosecuted as a parasite was Joseph Brodsky, a young poet and future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, he was considered among “the most politically unreliable” people, because he  “was part of a circle of anti-Soviet individuals” and “wrote poems of a decadent and even hostile nature” instead of engaging in activities that […]

  If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. –T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets The Heidelberg Project is an art environment in the heart of Detroit’s east side. The project was started by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in 1986. After serving in […]

Travelogue for Exiles Karl Shapiro Look and remember. Look upon this sky; Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air, The unconfined, the terminus of prayer. Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome. What do you hear? What does the sky reply? The heavens are taken: this is not your home. Look and remember. […]

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering — this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, […]

EVERY EXPLORER NAMES his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful–except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered. Walker […]

Night Mail W.H. Auden This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner and the girl next door. Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time. Past cotton-grass and moorland […]

“And, of course, that is what all of this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or […]

Of Mere Being Wallace Stevens The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze distance. A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird […]

Forgetfulness Billy Collins The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern […]

A Song W. B. Yeats I THOUGHT no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old? Though I have many words, What woman’s satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? Oh, who could have foretold […]