#daniel halpern

Sometimes you called on those you’d never know to come with you in place of those you loved, and talked to them and touched them and let them close purely for sadness, for sadness you’d hold them, and you’d let them go.

Daniel Halpern, Careless perfection

from here

An 18th-century Chinese white jade model of Guanyin holding a rishi fungus, seated beside a phoenix

8 interesting books I have read so far this year https://creativeramblings.com/reviews/books-2024

Photo credit: Cendrine Marrouat Looking for books to add to your TBR pile? I’ve got you covered! ‘Wild New World’ by Dan Flores: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America’ Author: Dan Flores Release date: October 25, 2022 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9781324006176 Synopsis: Informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Dan Flores celebrates…

For the love of story

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash Over the holidays, I posted about what I was reading, particularly regarding a short story by Heinrich Böll, one of Germany’s greatest post World War literary authors. Today, I am looking back on a short story collection I picked up in a wonderful used bookstore when I lived in a different part of town. The collection is called The Art of the Tale: An…

Why Poetry? Well, yes. Most books of poetry sell a couple of thousand copies, at best. So in a quantitative sense, what’s the point of supporting it? [...]

A question I often ask myself is why so many people (and we’re now talking about millions of people) turn to poetry for all important rites of passage — weddings, funerals, toasts, tragedies, eulogies, birthdays. . . . Why? Because the language of poetry avoids the quotidian — but the best poetry simultaneously celebrates the quotidian. Language that’s focused in such a way that true meaning and emotion is redolent in the air. The poet W.S. Merwin once said: “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments . . . because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible, poetry remains close to the origins of language.”

The novelist Richard Ford differed from the poets in his take: “The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”