Brenda Ueland On Writing And Two Poems 

     "Why urge everybody to write when the world is so full if writers, and there are oceans of printed matter?

     Because, "...if everybody writes and respects and loves writing, then we would have a nation of intelligent, eager, impassioned readers; and generous and grateful ones, not mere critical, logy, sedentary passengers, observers of writing, whose attitude is: 'All right entertain me now.' Then we would all talk to each other in our writing with excitement and passionate interest,....The result: some great, great national literature."

     And, "Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?"

     "Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth and Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others."
                                                                    -from "If You Want to Write: A Book About Art,                                                                                       Independence and Spirit, c. 1938, still in print. 

Two Poems

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it means.

-Billy Collins, from his "Poetry 180", c. 2003


A Poem: A Work in Progress

Beginning
voice
a song

springing from within
tempered from without

voice
my song
singing of the coolness
of spring nights

starting flowers
of the sun
of the morning light

a poem.

II

But for the poem
there would be no

voice, no song
of the moonlight

and so from
a quiet desperate desert

I dare to strain
my inner eye

to see this outward image
called world

to quench a thirst
larger than myself

larger still than space
than time;

I would share
with you
these images
for a little while

to ease a loneliness
that shapes itself
continuously
into the form of a man

a woman
that knows a pain

greater than silence
that seeks to answer

the single delicate question
whispered in secret places

in cloistered rooms
in valleys
on mountain tops,

why?

a poem....

-Nick Marconi