Old Swan House Garden late 2016

The grass garden Sept 2016

The garden in September 2016

The loggia October 2017

The garden October 2016

The garden in autumn 2016

The grass garden in the frost 2016

What is Poetry?

Your poetry arises of its own accord; when you and the object have become one; when you have delved deep enough into the object to apprehend within it some hidden glimmering

Basho

What is a lovely phrase?
One that has mopped up as much truth as it can hold

Virgina Woolf

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. 

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. 

Mary Oliver

"All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. ... Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence ..." (Belloc.)

Listen to WB Yeats reading his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Said a Blade of Grass

Old Swan House Garden in Autumn

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.” 

Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.” 

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass. 

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”

Kahil Gibran