Month: August 2007

The lintel low enough to keep out pomp and pride:
The threshold high enough to turn deceit aside.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Revenge of the Poet

I’ll write a poem
that’ll show’em

The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.

Carnival

Ladbroke Grove is funkier than York
In York you see policemen walking
On the beat
But in Ladborke Grove
You see them walking
On the off-beat

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2.

– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused –

from Aubade

The Queerness of it All

frQg
pQnd
plQp

by reference to http://www.mysmallboat.info/2005/10/22/matsuo-basho/

You must have long range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short range failures.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

On Being Asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

“Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

A mosquito was heard to complain

A mosquito was heard to complain
That a chemist had poisoned his brain
The cause of his sorrow
Was paradichloro
Diphenyltrichloroethane.

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Judge: Are you trying to show contempt for this court, Mr Smith?
Smith: No, My Lord. I am attempting to conceal it.

May it be long, at least
This life one has to live.

For difficult
is the lesson

Every autobiography is concered with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out.

Language unstable as sand, but poets
Strike on hard rock, carving
Rune and hieroglyph , to celebrate
Breath’s sweet brevity.

Here Dead We Lie

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Words … are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, defining that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos… They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.