Moderation Is Not a Negation of Intensity, But Helps Avoid Monotonyby John Tagliabue
Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
together
for some clear "meaning"--some momentary summary?
no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day;
the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
long tumultuous stretches;
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;
linger, lunge,
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn't take much centering
of one's forces;
as wise Whitman said "lounge and invite the soul." Get
enough sleep;
and not only because (as Cocteau said) "poetry is the
literature of sleep";
be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least; we don't want
Sunday church bells
ringing constantly.
2 comments:
If you use the "Edit HTML" pane and paste the formatted poem there, then put the tag < pre > above the poem and the tag < /pre > below the poem, the formatting will be saved (remove the spaces). It will use the ugly basic font unless you switch back to the "Compose" pane and highlight the poem and change the font to something nicer. I tested it on my blog, and it worked perfectly. Let me know if it doesn't work for you. The < pre > tag is to designate preformatted text.
To clarify, you have to remove the spaces in the tag. I can't write them as they actually are, because Blogger tries to recognize them as tags. So you have put it all together: the "<" and then "pre" and then ">" for the tag to work. I hope that makes sense.
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