- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions
Epigraph
Epigraph
- Source:
- The Poetry of Everyday Life
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
(p.vii) By poet, I mean every inventor, be he big or small, every discoverer, be he strong or weak, every creator, be he great or humble … and everyone who stands in awe before the day and the night, be he a philosopher or a guard at a vineyard.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
… As we beheld her striding there alone, [We] knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
—WALLACE STEVENS, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
I believe that creativity makes the world better: that if we are able, all of us, to figure out a way to reach into our deepest selves, to draw upon the unknown, to go below the surface of what we must do to live and to survive, to examine, with as much honesty as we can, what we believe, what we know to be true, and what we must do to be on that path, that the world is thereby improved. But nothing is easy. Really nothing.
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions