Sydney Lea: Hush
Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills.
Meg Kearney: Hearts of Poets (Two Poems)
By the time his body washed ashore, all
that was left was burned on the beach, deathbed
a pyre lit by three friends; two then fled
GEORGE YANCY: How Can Philosophy Speak to a World in Crisis? The Answer May Lie in Our Bodies
Whether we are ill, depressed, anxious, suffering from injustice, a refugee, incarcerated — having contact with beauty can lift our spirits, rehumanizing us.
John Clare: Autumn
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
Lord Byron: Epitaph to a Dog
…all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.
Baron Wormser: The Dark Sky | Politics and Its Discontents
It may be that the love that lives within us cannot be turned toward something as large and seemingly abstract as the earth. But the earth isn’t abstract at all. Each moment is local and real and is always a place where we might begin.
John Keats: When I have fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain
Christopher Bursk: The Procession to the Palace of King Neptune
How could a man, barnacled as rock
at low tide, rank as seaweed,
have a story worth listening to
by a prince enamored of the moon?
Video: Poetry and Immortality in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale | Belinda Jack
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — a lecture by Oxford Professor Belinda Jack
Doug Anderson: Negative Capability
…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.
John Clare: The Thunder Mutters
The thunder mutters louder & more loud
With quicker motion hay folks ply the rake
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave
Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,
Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon!
Sydney Lea: I Was Thinking Of Beauty
I was thinking of beauty
as something that will return–here’s Curtis Porter’s sweet horn–
outlasting our disputations.
