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What is beautiful is easily lost

on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 with 0 comments » | ,

Via an article at the Bookslut on Charles Simic's poetry, I read this closing stanza of his poem, The Altar (which can be read in its entirety at Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac)

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.
And let me add to that this quote from his essay "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy"
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a tornphotograph, etc. ... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. These objets trouves of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge.That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal.
That's what I hope to achieve through my posts under the Life label....not so much what these incidents, words, and stories mean but rather, "what they show and reveal" about life in all its joys, fragility, melancholy and absurdities.

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