In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
From Donald Hall
I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.
When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.
A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.
Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
1 perspectives