A couple of nice bits encountered in recent reading: First the poet August Kleinzahler in a piece on poet Michael O’Brien.
“But [George] Oppen taught O’Brien a great deal, lessons he took to heart. Later, he described what he had learned:
A kind of plain-spokenness about inner things. Not to simplify. To know as precisely as you could just how complicated things are, and not to make them either more or less so.
Patience. That there are things you can’t rush.
‘Paradise of the real’. That it was here, if anywhere … How resonant that word ‘real’, was for Oppen, for Duncan, for Jack Spicer.
That there was no part of one’s life that couldn’t be part of one’s poem.
Clarity. That clarity was possible.
That you could employ prose or verse as needed.
That writing poems was a serious business. Not that you had to be a bloody owl, but that it mattered.”
And a quote from a piece on libraries in the Sunday NYTimes (the essay is by Manesh Rao here quoting Sophie Mayer).
“[The library is] the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space,” because there “each person is pursuing their own aim (education, entertainment, affect, rest) with respect to others, through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge — the book.”
And finally encountered this lovely piece ending a recital recently. Ivor Gurney’s “Sleep” (here sung by Bryn Terfel).
A Few Reasonable Words 
.JPG){kind=link}