Moya Cannon: "Openings" & "Still Life"

OPENINGS

In my chest a rusted metal door
is creaking open,
the door of a decompression chamber
cranked up on barnacled chains.

The rush of air hurts and hurts
as larks fly
in and out,
in and out
between my bended ribs.

--Moya Cannon

STILL LIFE

Much though we love best
those intersections of time and space
where we are love's playthings,
a sweet anonymity of flesh --
life's blessed rhythm
loving itself through us,
two human bodies tuned
to the whirring stars --

this is almost nothing
without the small, quotidian gifts,
habitual caresses which hinder fears,
the grace of small services rendered --
two bowls of blueberries and yoghurt,
two cups of coffee,
two spoons,
laid out on a wooden table
in October sunlight.

--Moya Cannon

-- from Moya Cannon's Hands,

Carcanet Press Limited,

Manchester, UK, 2011

Byron: "Many Are Poets Who Have Never Penned"

Many are Poets who have never penned
Their inspiration, and perchance the best:
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner beings; they compressed
The God within them, and rejoined the stars
Unlaurelled upon earth, but far more blessed
Than those who are degraded by the jars
Of Passion, and their frailties linked to fame,
Conquerors of high renown, but full of scars.
Many are Poets but without the name;
For what is Poesy but to create
From overfeeling Good or Ill; and aim
At an external life beyond our fate,
And be the new Prometheus of new men,
Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,
Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain,
And vultures to the heart of the bestower,
Who, having lavished his high gift in vain,
Lies to his lone rock by the sea-shore?
So be it: we can bear.—

--Lord Byron, the opening lines to Canto IV
of The Prophecy of Dante

Byron: Shaving Tips

"I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?"

-- Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore, 5 July 1821

M.C. Richards: Being Passionate, Defined

          But of course we have to be passionate.  That is to say, when we are, we must be able to be.  We must be able to let the intensity -- the Dionysian rapture and disorder and the celebration of chaos, of potentiality, the experience of surrender -- we must be able to let it live in our bodies, in our hands, through our hands into the materials we work with.  I sense this: that we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons.  We come to know ourselves, and others, through the images we create in such moods.  These images are disclosures of ourselves to ourselves.  They are life-revelations.  If we can stay 'on center' and look with clear-seeing eyes and compassionate hearts at what we have done, we may advance in self-knowledge and in knowledge of our materials and of the world in its larger concerns.


--M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person