whirlwind of disasters

“Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins. The days go numb, the wind sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves. Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have. Be earth now, and evensong. Be the ground lying under that sky.”

“One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food–lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”

“For me, haiku is a question of feeling, of sensibility. I can’t just work sixteen-hour days and then say to myself, ‘Okay, if I concentrate hard, if I work at finding just the right word, I will compose a good haiku.’ I need to change how I approach the world. I need to look at the flowers and the grass beside the road. I’ve got to try to write poetry about what I see around me. I believe that the more I approach haiku in this way and the more I understand the essence of haiku, the better my poetry will be.”

“La literatura masculina ha dado lo suyo: describir al hombre e inventar a la mujer, probablemente la literatura femenina cubra la otra mitad, ahí donde la mujer sea de veras ella misma, y el hombre comience a mirarse, para su propia perplejidad, desde los ojos de ella. Masculine literature has made its contribution: to describe men and invent women; probably feminine literature covers the other half, there where woman is really herself, and man begins to look at himself, in his own perplexity, out of her eyes.”