Emptied womb, empty mind,
empty heart: it was easy to lose
myself those weekday afternoons
with the turn of a knob, to lose
my life in those other lives
on the small bright screen
where someone crashed
her car, had a brain tumor,
took the wrong call, wrong turn,
"As the World Turns," those
"Days of Our Lives,"
"The Guiding Light" failing
to guide them for fifteen–minute
segments of betrayal, false
accusation, addiction, fraud
and delusion. Glossy as their
houses, hair and make–up were,
those characters were me,
those hours till school pick–up,
when my only joy would break
from the line of other children
waving her artwork to greet me.
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Sketch of a smiling Robert Hass
Robert Hass: The Books on his Nightstand

"When I read Ursula Le Guin, who grew up in Berkeley, I thought that I had discovered that I loved science fiction, and read a lot of it and discovered that I just loved Ursula Le Guin, unless Calvino and Borges count as science fiction."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of The Complete Poems of William Blake
What Sparks Poetry:
Mathias Svalina on William Blake's "The Tyger"

"Maybe my dedication to poetry....this desire to manufacture transcendences out of words, is just chasing this first high of visionary realization & its predicating brain chemistry. One moment you can be a child in a classroom, terrified & trapped, & then you read the right words, & you are free. It’s true. Freedom is real. Art is true. And once you know a true thing, it is difficult to un-know."
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