It's making me think, which is wonderful!

I used a gift card to buy this out-of-print, rare book about concordia discors in Pope & Dryden, etc. Oh, to have time traveled and picked it up in 1968 (reprint) for a mere $3.45 instead of what I paid for it, listening to "Hey Jude" and knowing Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon.

Walker Percy. Born May 28, 1916.

Today is poet Linda Pastan's birthday, an event celebrated by this poem. How appropriate the theme -- the love of books and the fact they thicken life (which continues to tick away). #poetry

"The problem is to achieve excellence in this society...with all its exciting and debilitating confusion of standards, with all its beloved and exasperating clutter, with all the stubborn problems that won't be solved and the equally stubborn ones that might be" #SundaySentence

Memorial Day will be celebrated outdoors in many places. This book reminds us that forests may be the opposite of societal civility and order, but they also link us to our past, our beginnings. In them, we can feel the spirit that "rolls through all things," as Wordsworth said.

I found a gift card in my "things" and purchased the out-of-print book below from 1959. The bookseller noted a few pencil marks are to be found in Chapter 1, "at which point the reader must have given up." I won't.

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time, keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips...pride not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts...."

"Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself...I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that—by hearing his work" — John Lennon, qtd. in "Where The Music Had To Go" by Jim Windolf #SundaySentence

A short sentence adds emphasis, puts the brakes on momentum—for a reason. Here in "The Blood of the Lamb," Peter DeVries bargains with the universe, asking for more time in which to live every moment with his daughter who is dying of leukemia.

My favorite chapter in this lovely book concerns Victorian men's beards—Tennyson's representing "one of the less salubrious corners" of the culture. In fact, Edward Lear may have written his limerick about a man who found birds nesting in his beard about his pal Alfred, Lord T.

"The acrid redolence of integrity" may be the phrase of the day. Imagine having it in such abundance, it gave off an aroma like wild grasses, both pungent and pervasive. I thought it important that we see integrity celebrated, even in an epitaph. The poet, F. Morgan, founded The Hudson Review.

Is there a ham-fisted "blue"? Pick out the one that looks most like the color of a motel pool, and that's what You-Know-Who chose for the new base coat of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

"And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." - Shelley

"By other men's labors, we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, and if it is our wish...there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam"—Seneca #SundaySentence

Me, too.

This winsome poem by Jacqueline Osherow featured in Poetry Daily. Poetry and good writing: to beat back the bad, of which there is too much.

What a wonderful poem.

In the mid 20th-century novel filed under humor, "Reuben, Reuben" (later a movie w/Tom Conti), Peter DeVries creates Gowan McGland, a Scottish poet/bounder who wants fame w/o effort: "Oh, the first discovery that one is to be henceforth the tormented fulcrum of apathy and aspiration."

"Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober," he said, "and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation—the Apollonian and the Dionysian, spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline" — Peter DeVries (not Hemingway) #SundaySentence

How can there be folks so benighted--or willing to be snookered--they buy these two mutually exclusive claims said on the same day?

Seamus Heaney called this poem "a broken arch, with an octave of description aspiring toward a conjunction with a sestet of doctrine." But N.H. MacKenzie says, "Like all good and perfect gifts," the richness of spring flows from above, the tree boughs joining earth to sky. #MayDay #spring

Once upon a time, we'd see the occasional chiasmus in a writer's works. Not so much anymore.

Apparently.

Just a reminder: "No one wants advice—just corroboration" — John Steinbeck

"The right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world's wonders and more pained by its inequities, more wise, more kind"—James Mustich, "1,000 Books to Read" #SundaySentence

Today is the birthday of Ted Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. A Nebraskan, he shows us that if the words are just right, accessibility can be a reason to love poetry.

And no expatriates like Henry James, God forfend.

BBC Culture polled non-UK book critics "to give an outsider’s perspective on the best in British literature." "Middlemarch" (1874) holds the No. 1 spot. Calvino said, "A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers."

Once an English teacher—always an English teacher. I read this news article about Kash Patel's lawsuit— "that centers on alleged journalistic negligence"—full of spelling, copy-editing and formatting errors. Such irony: Patel’s lawsuit emphasizes "accuracy, fact-checking and editorial rigor."

‪This is the most popular of my recent poems on my website, unserious though it be (for the most part). It encapsulates the endless need for promotion after one writes a book. Buy it, darn it, we all scream. And when they don't, one resorts to a different kind of appeal.

Facebook has lost its new car smell. What was once a platform that showcased what defined us is now a graveyard where our friends can comment by not commenting. But should friendship be so fungible? I wrote about it here. www.judehopkinswriting.net/post/my-eleg...

‪"Often, catching sight of something or other—a drop of water, a shell, a hair—you stopped, stood quite still, your gaze transfixed, your heart opened" — Gustave Flaubert, qtd. in "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment" #SundaySentence

Faulkner: "the rasping darkness of summer," "the bees sounded like a wind getting up," "a rippling shawl of leaves," "the bird whistled...invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless," "me feeling her eyes...like they were touching my face," "the fledged leaves..."

”Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” He sank into thought. “And what if I am wrong,” he cried suddenly after a moment’s thought. “What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean—and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Crime and Punishment"

In addition to the poem's evocation of nature's indifference to the often inscrutable goings-on of humans, in this case, war, I love the synesthesia in the phrase "shimmering sound" to describe the circling sparrows. Reminds me, message wise, of the Stephan Crane poem "A Man Said to the Universe."

I will look it up (on video). Thank you.

I love him, too. Like this gem:

"Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky" — William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury" #SundaySentence

Welsh poet Gillian Clarke reminds us why we need poetry to counteract the world's coarseness: "a trug of thundercloud" (describing blue hydrangeas) "a load of night-inks shaken from their hair" "their indigoes / tide-marked and freckled with the rose/ of death, beautiful in decline."

This book comes out in June, and I intend to read it. "Throughout, (author) Kate McLoughlin illuminates the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words."

Some people scroll by poems. But this one, by Theodore Roethke, seemingly speaks about the struggle involved when winter turns to spring. It's important to remember that all transformations—winter to spring, but also those from one bad era to a better one—require effort. So keep fighting.

"The road to excellence is paved with mediocrity" — Theodore Dalrymple, "The Strut and Trade of Charms" #SundaySentence

From Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Spring," in which the line "I know what I know" takes on such significance this year.

I used to think this quotation was awfully snooty. Maybe it still is. But we can't be ground down by the soul-sucking, spirit-stealing people who dominate our airwaves, one in particular.

Imagine naming a library after someone illiterate.

"Language is the soul's ozone layer, and we thin it at our peril" — Sven Birkerts, "The Gutenberg Elegies" #SundaySentence

Good luck to all who participate in the "No Kings" day marches. Here are some encouraging words about continuing the fight even when all seems hopeless — from Mara van der Lugt from her book "Hopeful Pessimism":

As a former English teacher, I try to counteract the ignorance coming out of the White House by reminding you that there are moments of brilliance to revel in. Like Shakespeare's use of polyptoton, the repetition of a word in a different form but from the same root. We fight back in various ways.

Bashō on tending one's garden. Good advice in troubled times.