#philip booth

[headlightsforever]

I have no worry at all about the fact that I've dealt with some of the same subjects over and over in, I hope, varying perspectives, various lights if you will, to transfer the metaphor into painting. Cézanne—to speak in a different breath again—painted "Mont Sainte-Victoire" any number of times, and each of those paintings is different, and each of them casts light on the other.

Philip Booth

[derangedrhythms]

[...] Philip Booth, who said that a good poem “makes the world more habitable … [it] changes the world slightly in favor of being alive and being human.” 

Paul B. Janeczko, from 'I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You: Paired Poems by Men & Women', ed. Naomi Shihab Nye & Paul B. Janeczko

[chiclet-go-boom]

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand. Gently, and I will hold you. Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A dead- man's float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

           - Philip Booth

[sashayed]

So

So, there’s no way to be sure. Not about much of anything. No more about anyone else than ourselves. Perhaps not even of death, except that it’s bound to happen. To you, yes; to me, us: the lot of humankind, given how humankind sees it from this near side. So what.

So nothing that we here and now can perfectly know. Save, though the lens our eyes raise, the old here and now. The this, the already-going that moves us. The red-shift we’re constantly part of. And why not? Between what we were, and are going to be, is who and how we best love.

Philip Booth (1925-2007) Selves, 1991

[aristotlemcdonald]

So

So, there’s no way to be sure. Not about much of anything. No more about anyone else than ourselves. Perhaps not even of death, except that it’s bound to happen. To you, yes; to me, us: the lot of humankind, given how humankind sees it from this near side. So what.

So nothing that we here and now can perfectly know. Save, though the lens our eyes raise, the old here and now. The this, the already-going that moves us. The red-shift we’re constantly part of. And why not? Between what we were, and are going to be, is who and how we best love.

[aemperatrix]

Philip Booth

[kasiiah]

Beside you, Lying down at dark, My waking fits your sleep. Your turning Flares the slow-banked fire Between our mingled feet, And there, Curved close and warm Against the nape of love, Held there, Who holds your dreaming Shape, I match my breathing To your breath; And sightless, keep my hand On your heart's breast, keep Nightwatch On your sleep to prove There is no dark, nor death.

Nightsong by Philip Booth

[headlightsforever]

Berghash: In a good number of your later poems you talk about the meaning of nothing. You say that it is "an acute presence of absence," as against the "raw beauty of being." When I read this I understood it as a way of being which is egoless, and therefore more integrated with oneself and the world.

Booth: It does seem to me that ego can become part of a kind of universal ego. Not that the self is submerging its ego to be­come part of that whole, but that the presence of the ego in the self can become part of a larger "raw beauty of being," to pick up the line you just quoted. I am tempted to extend this and say that such integration strengthens the so-to-speak ego of the whole. That is a fair enough extension of let's say psycho­analytic theory, although I don't often think in terms of the theory. It is much more an intuitive sense that I have. I think it's Masefield who says in a poem, maybe it's in "Dauber," "The days that make us happy make us wise." That comes back to your sense of there being something beyond survival, something in the fruition of one's feeling, the flowering that is itself a wisdom which is sustaining. And its name is joy.

Philip Booth interviewed by Rachel Berghash from Chances of Survival: Philip Booth in Conversation