#robert bringhurst

[garadinervi]

Robert Bringhurst, What Is Reading for?, Cary Graphic Arts Press – Rochester Institute of Technology / RIT Press, Rochester, NY, 2011

[riverbird]

"Simone Weil writes: "The poet produces the beautiful by fixing attention on something real. The same with the act of love. To know that that man, who is hungry and thirsty, truly exists as much as I do — that is enough, the rest follows of itself." Love, awareness, and the desire to respond: these are distinguishable but inseparable aspects of genuine intelligence." Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis

[cutiewithawakenedheart]

"One cannot ask this world, these trees,

oneself, nor other beings, even

rocks, to last forever."

----Robert Bringhurst

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning

[mon-nid]

[noosphe-re]

A Quadratic Equation

Voice: the breath's tooth. Thought: the brain's bone. Birdsong: an extension of the beak. Speech: the antler of the mind.

— Robert Bringhurst

(from Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst, and quoted in David Abram's Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

OBX :: Rodanthe

* * * *

“THESE POEMS, SHE SAID” 

For years I carried this poem by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst in my mind like a totem.

These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them. These are the poems of a man who would leave his wife and child because they made noise in his study. These are the poems of a man who would murder his mother to claim the inheritance. These are the poems of a man like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not comprehend but which nevertheless offended me. These are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women, she said. These are the poems of a man with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s hands, woven of water and logic and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant as elm leaves, which if they love love only the wide blue sky and the air and the idea of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. These poems, she said.… You are, he said, beautiful. That is not love, she said rightly. —

[quoted in Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer ]

[artofthemindblog]

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact... a textus, which means cloth.

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style