https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf Poetry and Prose en-us 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC 2023-07-16 18:12:32 UTC hello@padlet.com caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300429 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300429 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300432 You need to be blank, and even a little bit bored, for your brain to feed you ideas. The poet Wendell Berry wrote that in solitude, “one’s inner voices become audible.” Figure out your clearest, most productive time of day to work, and guard this time carefully.

Always carry a pen, a paper notebook, and something good to read. A lot of life consists of the dead time in between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos. Fill them with things that feed your work and your soul.
— Pamela Druckerman]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300432 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300433 "Unless you can transcribe the score to a symphony you’ve never heard before as you’re listening to it please don’t try and sideline rap because you can’t 'understand what they’re saying'."]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300433 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300434 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300434 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300435 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300435 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300436   I am looking at trees
  they may be one of the things I will miss
  most from the earth
  though many of the ones I have seen
  already I cannot remember
  and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
  and have never been able to speak
  with one
  I listen to them tenderly
  their names have never touched them
  they have stood round my sleep
  and when it was forbidden to climb them
  they have carried me in their branches
 — W. S. Merwin]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300436 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300437 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300437 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300438 Takamatsu walked quickly away from the crowd. He stayed close to the sea, and I tried to catch up with him. He started searching again. He stepped onto a pile of rocks, put his hands on his knees, and stared down into the sea. Th search for love, the search — his, hers, everyone’s — is not for a needle in a haystack, nor a fish in the sea. It’s for a specific person on the earth. The world never looks as big as when someone is lost.
— Jennifer Percy]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300438 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300439 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300439 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300440 "It was even longer before the Spirituals were recognized as a theology in song, a new interpretation of Christianity, one far closer to the original than that practiced by those who hoped the Bible would serve as a tool of pacification, not enlightenment. 

At some point, white scholars must have heard the Spirituals. It is easy to imagine their reaction. Even the most hostile would have had to admit that the sometimes joyous and often plaintive melodies had a surface attraction. The scholars would have concluded, though, that the basically primitive song-chants were not capable of complex development and were certainly too simplistic to convey sophisticated musical ideas. The music, moreover, was not in classical form, likely deemed a fatal defect. Indeed, the slave songs were not even written down by those unknown persons who had composed them. Surely, these simple melodies could not be compared with the lieder of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms. 

Whatever they were, the critics would conclude, these songs were not art. There was no potential in the music for intellectual inspiration as opposed to purely emotional satisfaction. Of course, the critics might concede, in the hands of classically trained composers and musicians, the Spirituals might serve as folk melodies from which true art might be rendered. Stephen Foster was said to have done this, and later Antonin Dvorak, and still later, George Gershwin. Many others followed. A few of them credited the genius in the slave songs, but most simply took what they wanted and called it their own without acknowledgement of the sources that, when asked, they deprecated and denied. 

Need it be said that fortunes were made through the utilization and often the corruption of the slave melodies? Need it be said that those who originated this music seldom benefitted financially from their creations? There is no surprise here. A nation built on the backs of black labor would have little difficulty profiting from the product of black minds and hearts."

— Derrick Bell]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300440 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300441 Nobody at any rate reads it much. Your 
lay
citizenry have other forms of fun.

Still, who would wish to live in a culture of which future anthropologists would say Oddly, they had none?

— Richard Kenney ]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300441 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300442 Art is not apart. It is a continuum within which all participate; we all function in art, use the skills of art, engage in the action of artists, every day. Underneath the surface distinctions that make individual lives seem very different, art is a common ground we share; the work of art is a way we all do things when we are working well. Our unheralded everyday actions of art comprise one end of the human spectrum of artistry; the other end is the creation of masterpieces in the arts that we readily label as art: newlyweds setting the table for their first Thanksgiving dinner on one extreme, and da Vinci painting The Last Supper on the other; a businesswoman shifting the sequence of the slides in her presentation on one extreme, Sam Shepard transposing the order of the scenes during rehearsals of True West on the other. The differences are obvious, easy to identify and laugh about; the similarities (which are the focus of this book) may be less evident, but they construct t
 he way we experience being alive. If we can acknowledge and honor the art that we perform, if we can stay aware of and develop the skills of art we use daily, if we can borrow appropriate and useful trade secrets from artists, who are the experts and exemplars of this field, we can dramatically enrich the quality of daily life.
— Eric Booth]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300442 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300445
I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300445 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300447 My sister woke me very early
 that morning and told me
 “Get up, you have to come see this
 the ocean’s filled with stars”
 Delighted by the revelation
 I dressed quickly and thought
If the ocean’s filled with stars
 I must take the first flight
 and collect all of the fish from the sky

— Mario Melendez]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300447 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300452  By the first of August 
 the invisible beetles began 
 to snore and the grass was 
 as tough as hemp and was 
 no color—no more than 
 the sand was a color and 
 we had worn our bare feet 
 bare since the twentieth 
 of June and there were times 
 we forgot to wind up your 
 alarm clock and some nights 
 we took our gin warm and neat 
 from old jelly glasses while 
 the sun blew out of sight 
 like a red picture hat and 
 one day I tied my hair back 
 with a ribbon and you said 
 that I looked almost like 
 a puritan lady and what 
 I remember best is that 
 the door to your room was 
 the door to mine.
— Anne Sexton]]> 2021-11-22 14:55:09 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906300452 caelismith https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906327252 2021-11-22 15:05:46 UTC https://padlet.com/caelismith/wc3xrxzezbwuhajf/wish/1906327252