Category: language

How to Be a Poet
By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

To shelter at noon, pallid and rapt,
back against a scalding orchard wall;
to hear from in the thick of briars
blackbirds’ blatter, the slither of adders.

To spy how over the tares’ stalks, along cracks
in the earth, lines of red ants break
and close ranks, intertwine
atop miniature haystacks.

To observe through boughs the sea’s
distant shimmering of scales
while from bald heights the cicadas
unleash their tremulous calls.

Then emerging into the dazzling sun,
to feel, grimly amazed, how all
of life, its drudgery, is in
this slow trek hard by a wall
whose top is harled with jagged shards.

Noon, Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick

“You look for it so you can confront the silence of a pure and uncompromising question.”
“Admire from afar, in silence”

–Sarr

… Just so you know there’s no one
for whom all is well. ?Just so you know
the lotus is married to the mud. ?Just so

you know to listen deeply is to love.
Just so you know, everything is an inside job.

What the River Said, Wendy Videlock