Poem Recitation Quotes

Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Sit here, so I may write you into a poem and make you eternal.

Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.

There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.

He's probably their battle poet, too." "You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.

She met a boy and called him Stargazer because instead of poems he recited the names of constellations. He said the freckles on his arms were roadmaps to the sky, and the bruises that he carried were supernovas in disguise. "Stargazer

I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.

He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon.

When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword. When you meet a man who is not a poet, do not show him your poem. Robert Greene rephrase: When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword. Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.

What Would Happen if God leaned down And gave you a full wet Kiss? Hafiz Doesn't mind answering astronomical questions Like that: You would surely start Reciting all day, inebriated, Rogue-poems Like This.

Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, “God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good”…She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly her. You cashed in for silver, Mr. Iscariot. But me? Me…I threw away gold. That’s a fact. That’s a natural fact.

Gone are the summer days and my mind along with them. No longer will I indulge in hopes of getting you back. It is hope that makes these chains heavier and autumnal nights longer. I will merely serve as a memory to you: the lover that recited love poems. I must go now and I urge you not to look back.

Speaking out loud, she recited an Amanda Hamilton poem: “I must let go now. Let you go. Love is too often The answer for staying. Too seldom the reason For going. I drop the line And watch you drift away. “All along You thought The fiery current Of your lover’s breast Pulled you to the deep. But it was my heart-tide Releasing you To float adrift With seaweed.

No matter how many romantic poems you recite, no matter how many glorious tales of love you read, how can you really understand the condition if you've never found yourself in it?

. . . Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula. Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK? Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

Stop blaming people for not helping you. No matter how your teacher teaches you to recite a poem, you can’t wear her smiling face to the platform. You’ve got to put that smile on your own face.

When day comes, we ask ourselves: Where can we find light In this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We braved the belly of the beast, We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’ Isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, Somehow, we do it. Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother, can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.

Autumn is a beautiful but sad poem that dying leaves recite with great enthusiasm so that the world will remember them as they bid farewell to the world!

Finnick recites a poem he wrote to his one true love in the Capitol, and about a hundred people faint because they’re sure he means them.

To know if someone can speak offensively or politely, don’t give him poem to recite; don’t give him a song to sing. Just engage him in an argument and you will know it for yourself who he is.

Alba, it's okay,' Clare says softly. She looks at me. 'Say the poem about lovers on the carpet.' I blank, and then I remember. I feel self-conscious reciting Rilke in front of all these people, and so I begin: 'Engel!: Es wäre ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen-' 'Say it in English,' Clare interrupts. 'Sorry.

During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

She was the only person in class who read her poem like it wasn't an assignment. She recited it like it was a living thing. Like something she was letting out. You couldn't look away from her as long as she was talking.

I don’t know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T’ang Dynasty.

You just wait. Soon, lovers all over the world will be reciting poems dedicated to you. This is my promise.

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off. The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks. Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.

Where were you when I undressed and told the tales of my day? Where were you when I was silent with God in prandial pray? Where were you when I recited love poems as I lay? Where were you?

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear BY MOSAB ABU TOHA For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD i When you open my ear, touch it gently. My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside. Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness. You may encounter songs in Arabic, poems in English I recite to myself, or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard. When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear. Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

so I start reciting a couple of Shel Silverstein poems I’ve memorized, and I verse myself all the way across the room to a big round opening you could drive a Mack truck through if you knew how to drive, which I don’t.

Malthus's school was in the centre of the town of Adrianople, and was not one of those monkish schools where education is miserably limited to the bread and water of the Holy Scriptures. Bread is good and water is good, but the bodily malnutrition that may be observed in prisoners or poor peasants who are reduced to this diet has its counterpart in the spiritual malnutrition of certain clerics. These can recite the genealogy of King David of the Jews as far back as Deucalion's Flood, and behind the Flood to Adam, without a mistake, or can repeat whole chapters of the Epistles of Saint Paul as fluently as if they were poems written in metre; but in all other respects are as ignorant as fish or birds.

Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon. I recited my poems in the kazoo that is my voice.

So when a little girl asks her father where the moon came from, he might tell her that the moon circles around the earth and reflects light from the sun. He might tell her that the moon likes to play hide-and-seek with the sun, so sometimes the moon looks like it’s peeking out from behind a black curtain; sometimes all you can see is the top of its head, and sometimes you can’t even see it at all! He might tell her about how the moon has invisible arms that can pull the oceans back and forth, making tides rise and fall. He might tell her that astronauts have walked on the moon and played golf on the moon and collected rocks from the moon. He might tell her that the moon has dimples and craters and basins that we can see only with a telescope and that there’s a special place on the moon called the Sea of Tranquility that isn’t really a sea. Then the father might take the little girl outside, hoist her up onto his shoulders, and let her stare at the moon for a while. He might recite a poem about a cow jumping over the moon or sing a song about a dreamy-eyed kid slow-dancing with it. Soon the little girl will become so lost in her father’s beautiful stories that she will forget she ever had a question to begin with.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.

He wasn’t talking to me; he sounded like somebody reciting a poem, and his eyes were wide and dreaming and stark barking mad.

Floribert could neither sing nor recite these poems because they were without words, but he dreamed and felt them sometimes, especially in the evenings.

As the leaves fell slowly from the trees, you played your violin for me, and I recited my poem for you...

but I can stand here reciting all the words I have over the hole & that's what's left—

Speaking out loud, she recited an Amanda Hamilton poem: “I must let go now. Let you go. Love is too often The answer for staying. Too seldom the reason For going.

Scene: Darkness. Suddenly, a single spotlight illuminates Apollo standing on the front porch of the Big House. The house is a bold red colour, a stark contrast to the short white chiton Apollo wears. He clears his throat and speaks. Apollo:<\b> A poem by Apollo, recited dramatically by ... Apollo: O Immortal Chiron, Centaur wise and true, Trainer of our heroes, Just remember who taught you. - The opening scene of Welcome to Camp Half-Blood Apollo's chiton was so short, I held my breath throughout this scene, praying he didn't bend over. - P. J.

His mind was constantly thinking about her, while he decided to recite a poem that he had written for her long ago. While he narrated, the words conjured memories like ghosts into the room.

and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster’s mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it. And

On his last voyage he had seemed on the brink of success and had stood in the prow reciting a grand poem of his own composition to a dim blue promontory in which he recognized one of the capes of Greenland. But it is idle to deny that the general feeling was dampened somehow, when they discovered it was the Cape of Good Hope. In short, the admiral was one of those who keep the world young.

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem: A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird? Rockefeller was a strange guy. But he figured out something that now applies to tens of millions of workers. Rockefeller’s job wasn’t to drill wells, load trains, or move barrels. It was to think and make good decisions. Rockefeller’s product—his deliverable—wasn’t what he did with his hands, or even his words. It was what he figured out inside his head. So that’s where

ladies & gentlemen," the Professor began, "the Other Professor is so kind as to recite a Poem. The title of it is 'The Pig-Tale.' He never recited it before!" (General cheering among the guests.) "He will never recite it again!" (Frantic excitement, & wild cheering all down the hall, the Professor himself mounting the table in hot haste, to lead the cheering, & waving his spectacles in one hand & a spoon in the other.)

LATER, WANDERING HER BEACH, she recited her favorite Amanda Hamilton poem. “Fading moon, follow My footsteps Through light unbroken By land shadows, And share my senses That feel the cool Shoulders of silence. “Only you know How one side of a moment Is stretched by loneliness For miles To the other edge, And how much sky Is in one breath When time slides backward From the sand.” If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.

It is incomprehensible that he should want to have these futile people here, and still more incomprehensible that he should be able to sit and listen to them and their stupid chatter. I can understand that he may occasionally listen to poets reciting their verses; they can be regarded as buffoons such as are always kept at court. They laud the lofty purity of the human soul, great events and heroic feats, and there is nothing to be said against all that, particularly if their songs flatter him. Human beings need flattery; otherwise they do not fulfill their purpose, not even in their own eyes. And both the present and the past contain much that is beautiful and noble which, without due praise, would have been neither noble nor beautiful. Above all, they sing the praises of love, which is quite as it should be, for nothing else is in such need of transformation into something different. The ladies are filled with melancholy and their breasts heave with sighs; the men gaze vaguely and dreamily into space, for they all know what it is really like and realize that this must be an especially beautiful poem.

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part.

The first thing I ever said to her was to recite a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly. "Hope sails and plunges firmly caught at the end of her string - fallen slack, pulling taught ragged and featherless. Hope never flies but doggedly watches for windy skies." She was quiet then. The last verse isn't really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes. Finally, Róza took a deep breath. "It's windy now," she said.

My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood.

The classes changed, with years, from wide soaring poems in flight to hushed talk about Jonathan before and after practice; to long involved recitations on the sand about the Divine One, with no flying ever done by anybody. Fletcher and the other students of Jonathan were at turns puzzled and correctful and firm and furious at the change, but they were helpless to stop it. They were honored, and worse—revered, but they were no longer heard, and the birds who practiced flying were fewer and fewer.

And as she recites Scripture words tumble out of my mouth too, all of the poems and stanzas I've memorized spill out, getting louder and louder, all out of order, until I'm yelling at the top of my lungs, heaving the words like weapons from my chest...

She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. “I see England,” he said, “I see France—

And with that recitation, Adelaide Buchwald gave Jack Cavallero her heart. Impulsively, gloriously, openly, she gave it to him, falling in love with someone she did not know, wondering at the curve of his cheek, and the wave of his hair, and the way his shirt draped over his shoulders. He made her laugh. He dared to write poems. He risked looking foolish in order to create something beautiful or strange. She wanted to know the story of the scar on his abdomen. How had he gotten that wound? How well had it healed? She could see by looking at him that he had been vulnerable. That he had lived. Survived. She wanted to see all his scars, see all of him, and she felt suddenly, intensely certain that he was a safe person to show her own scars to. She thought, Maybe we have known each other always. Maybe our hearts encountered each other somehow, like two hundred years ago at a cotillion, with him in a frock coat and me in whatever, some kind of elegant and complicated dress. Or maybe our encounter was in another possible world. That is, in one of the countless other versions of this universe, the worlds running parallel to this one, we are already in love.

The invisible bubble containing them rushed forward, and Lindon’s body shuddered with the instinct to protect itself, but Suriel spoke as though reciting a poem. “There are a million Paths in this world, Lindon, but any sage will tell you they can all be reduced to one. Improve yourself.” Lindon was still somewhat worried about offending this visitor from another world, but he dared to say, “That doesn’t sound like enough.” The mountain rushed closer as they descended into its shadow. “It’s been my path for longer than you would believe. Do you think anyone dares to attack my homeland?

I scan my memory for fragments of the poem that are floating in my memory. “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim.” I recite the one line I can remember and Lucía looks at me with pleasant surprise . “You know it? That’s great,” she exclaims and claps her hands together .

Radu had practiced the poem so often he could recite it in his sleep. He had stolen shiny bits from famous Arabic poems, gathering them like a raven to line his own nest. The language was dense and flowery, hyperbolic in the extreme. Murad listened, enraptured, as his reign was likened to the ocean and his posterity a mighty river.

They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. “In the early days,” Fanny recalled, “we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith.” Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The Roosevelts

Before leaving the hall for the stage, Rumi recited a poem, "With your grace, grief turns to joy. With your praise, life becomes infinite. Although love is a trouble, it is a joy. Though this wine is full of headaches, still it delights. Though being occupied with love is difficult, how sweet it is to trade hearts with you, oh beloved.

she recited an Amanda Hamilton poem: “I must let go now. Let you go. Love is too often The answer for staying. Too seldom the reason For going. I drop the line And watch you drift away. “All along You thought The fiery current Of your lover’s breast Pulled you to the deep. But it was my heart-tide Releasing you To float adrift With seaweed.

In a tavern in Fulkeston, Tristran gained great renown by reciting from memory Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the Twenty-Third Psalm, the “Quality of Mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice, and a poem about a boy who stood on the burning deck where all but he had fled, each of which he had been obliged to commit to memory in his school days. He

The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The

It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she loved those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually … you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?” “The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?” “Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?” “You’re kidding.” “He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’” “Jesus.” “Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.

For S, the first piece of information in a list was always, and without fail, inextricably linked to the second piece of information, which could only be followed by the third. It didn’t matter whether he was memorizing Dante’s Divine Comedy or mathematical equations; his memories were always stored in linear chains. Which is why he could recite poems just as easily backward as forward.

This poetry is utilitarian—heavy-duty, industrial strength poetry. It is meant to be read aloud and, even better, memorized and recited. It is best used in the natural world where there are starlit skies, the warmth of blazing fires, and sounds and sights of open expanse. This book is meant to be carried with you in the glove box of a pickup truck, the back pocket of a worn pair of pants, even a saddlebag. It is not made to take up space on a library shelf, squeezed between other unread volumes. Take it along; you never know when the opportunity will be just right. Nothing pleases more than to see copies of the book twice as thick as the original from continued page turning, with turned-down corners marking favorite poems, or the whole shape curved to match the owner’s posterior.

During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

He begins to recite some verses. A Persian poem. I don’t stop desiring when my desire Is fulfilled, when my mouth wins The red lips of my beloved, When my soul expires in the sweetness of her breath. Arslan smiles, he has recognized the inimitable Hafez of Shiraz, which is confirmed by the last couplet: And you will always invoke the name of Hafez In the company of the sad and the brokenhearted.

When Akira had recited the haiku to me the first time, I had been confused, thinking it compared love to storm clouds because they were capricious and fleeting. Perhaps love was capricious and fleeting, but that was not the true meaning of the poem. The true meaning was this: that love, when it came, was powerful enough to transform everything. Anything. Even the unchanging, ever-changing face of the Moon herself.

I keep reciting your poetry prescription - I've read that Rilke poem so many times now, I know it by heart. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but for someone who has never really understood poetry, I want you to know that I finally see what the big deal is. Poems are like the eau de parfum to the eau de cologne of a novel; you don't need nearly as many words to have such a powerful impact

An old man likes to return in memory to the days of his youth like a stranger who longs to go back to his own country. He delights to tell stories of the past like a poet who takes pleasure in reciting his best poem. He lives spiritually in the past because the present passes swiftly, and the future seems to him an approach to the oblivion of the grave. An hour full of old memories passed like the shadows of the trees over the grass

In spite of the years, Pushkin tells us, Tatyana remains in love with Onegin. Now, finally, she has a real chance to be with him. So, what does Tatyana do? Does she ditch her husband and elope with her true love? Nyet, she doesn’t. In the culminating scenes of Pushkin’s long poem, Tatyana decides to stick with her husband and, in her own nineteenth-century way, tells Onegin to fuck off. A simple love story which most Russians know by heart. Many are even able to recite entire chapters – ‘ya k vam pishu’, Tatyana’s letter, being an especially popular passage. The symbolism of the story should not be ignored. Tatyana, the pure girl from the countryside, embodies the essence of Russianness, while Onegin, the cosmopolitan bon vivant, is a cynical fucker corrupted by modern European values. Onegin’s life is about superficial pleasures. Tatyana’s is all about meaning.

These half-lines, or verses, with their clearly defined rhythmic forms, are the primary building blocks of Old English poetry and derive from a strictly oral tradition of pagan Germanic poetry at a time when there were no manuscripts, when minstrels carried tales in their heads and recited long poems, partly from memory and partly through the use of an oral-formulaic system which permitted them to compose as they went along, drawing upon a large store of “prefabricated” half-lines or entire lines and mixing them with fresh inventions. Some entire lines are pale clichés, adding nothing to the poem, like “on that day of this life” (which occurs three times in Beowulf ), but they give the minstrel time to think ahead. This is not peculiar to Germanic poetry—such lines are more frequent in the Odyssey, another poem derived from an ancient oral tradition, than in Beowulf.

For any woman who wants children,” she said, as softly as if reciting a love poem, “she has to be ready to face her greatest fears and the uprooting of any lies and delusions she holds about herself. She must be ready to fail . . . and hurt. It’s life’s way of making you face necessary resolutions. That beautiful baby growing inside of you will demand that of you. And the purpose and blessing, at least in part, is to become more aware of who you are and the strength you have access to as a woman.

I looked into this, and sure enough, in Jewish culture it is not the women who memorize Proverbs 31, but the men. Husbands commit each line of the poem to memory, so they can recite it to their wives at the Sabbath meal, usually in a song. “Eshet chayil mi yimtza v’rachok mip’ninim michrah,” they sing in the presence of their children and guests. “A valorous woman, who can find? Her value is far beyond pearls.” Eshet chayil is at its core a blessing—one that was never meant to be earned, but to be given, unconditionally.

He grew old strengthened by intelligence and reinforced by experience. He died with a full head of white hair and blue eyes as piercing as those of his youth. “How hard it is to die,” he told me one day when he was already very weary of pain. He spoke in proverbs, he knew hundreds of folk tales, and recited long poems from memory. This formidable man gave me the gift of discipline and love for language; without them I could not devote myself to writing today. He also taught me to observe nature and to love the landscape of Chile.

My dearest brother,” Marjorie replied with a sorrowful smile. “I am only sorry your heart has been broken.” “Cassius was right to refuse me,” Merrick replied even as the words ripped the fresh wound along the seams again. “He was only protecting himself. His reputation.” The words stuck in his throat. Had Merrick thought about the repercussions, he would’ve chosen a different route last night. He would not have done it so publicly perhaps, for Cassius’s sake, no matter what they’d whispered to each other their last night together. “I do not care who knows. It is only the harm it could do that holds me back. If I could, I would walk proudly by your side.” But what then? It was a jumbled mess no matter the outcome. Marjorie shook her head. “Cassius was protecting you. That much was evident.” The words only warmed Merrick for a brief instant. He knew Cassius cared for him. But now he understood that the idea of them being together was only a fool’s wish, no matter how many times he recited the words of Cas’s poem from memory and wished them true with all his might

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

Are there flowers here, your ladyship?' he asked when Pole had gone. 'Flowers?' Lucretia touched a hand to her cheek. 'Surely you have smelt rose water before?' In the Solar Gallery, remembered John. The scent teased his nostrils as he bent to prise open the first dumpling. The soft dough parted and a puff of steam carried a second sweet smell into the chamber. Lucretia peered at the glistening mass then looked up curiously. 'What dish is this?' '"Let me feed thee Honey-sugared Creams,"' John recited. '"As cool the Quodling's 'scaping Steam."' She stared at him, amazed. 'The verses? You can read?' 'Is it so strange in a cook?' 'I... no.' Lucretia gathered herself. 'Of course you must read your receipts.' 'They are our verses, your ladyship. We give each other recitals down there in our kitchens.' John brought a corked flask from inside his doublet and poured sweetened cream over the apple. He watched her dig into the apple's oozing flesh, swirl the thick cream then slip the marbled mixture into her mouth. 'Your honey-sugared cream is as sweet as the verses claim,' Lucretia told him, swallowing. 'It all but conquers the sourness of the quodling.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

rhyme jumped into Sienna’s mind: Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.” A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry.

He thus didn’t find himself outside the limits of his experience; he was high above it. His distaste for himself remained down below; down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in his poem, he was above his paltriness, the key-hole episode and his cowardice were merely a trampoline above which he was soaring; he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written. The next day he used his grandfather’s typewriter to copy the poem on special paper; and the poem seemed even more beautiful to him than when he had recited it aloud, for the poem had ceased to be a simple succession of words and had become a thing; its autonomy was even more incontestable; ordinary words exist only to perish as soon as they are uttered, their only purpose is to serve the moment of communication; subordinate to things they are merely their designations; whereas here words themselves had become things and were in no way subordinate; they were no longer destined for immediate communication and prompt disappearance, but for durability. What Jaromil had experienced the day before was expressed in the poem, but at the same time the experience slowly died there, as a seed dies in the fruit. “I am underwater and my heartbeats make circles on the surface”; this line represents the adolescent trembling in front of the bathroom door, but at the same time his feature in this line, slowly became blurred, this line surpassed and transcended him. “Ah, my aquatic love”, another line said, and Jaromil knew that aquatic love was Magda, but he also knew that no one could recognise her behind these words; that she was lost, invisible, buried there, the poem he had written was absolutely autonomous, independent and incomprehensible as reality itself, which is no one’s ally and content simply to be; the poem’s autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life; he found that so beautiful that the next day he tried to write more poems; and little by little he gave himself over to this activity.

He recited the poem to her. "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens" Allison applauded, “William Carlos Williams. A classic. A very short classic.” “You know what it means?” “An ode to a wheelbarrow?” … “Dr. Williams was a pediatrician,” he said. “He wrote that while sitting at the bedside of a dying child.” Dr. Capello blinked and in an instant tears were in his eyes. And hers. “I never knew,” she said. “Wonder why he thought of that.” “I'd say he was looking out the window and trying to think about anything other than the little child he couldn't save. All doctors keep a graveyard inside their hearts for those patients. That's why I like my view so much.” He reached out and tapped the glass of his window, which looked out onto the ocean. “It comforts me.” “Looking at the Graveyard of the Pacific comforts you?” she asked. “Of course it does,” he said, gazing out his window at the dark shifting waters in the near distance. “Compared to the graveyard out there, mine's tiny. A doctor with children in his graveyard takes any comfort he can get.

I know a ton of poetry by heart,” Tartt says, when I comment on her recital of the Nabokov rhyme. It’s true. She has an alarming ability to simply break into passages, short or long, from her favorite writing. She quotes, freely and naturally, from Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Buddha, and Plato—as well as David Byrne of Talking Heads and Jonathan Richman of the Modem Lovers. And many others. “When I was a little kid, first thing I memorized were really long poems by A. A. Milne,” she says. ‘‘Then I went through a Kipling phase. I could say ‘Gunga Din’ for you. Then I went into sort of a Shakespeare phase, when I was about in sixth grade. In high school, I loved loved loved Edgar Allan Poe. Still love him. I could say ‘Annabel Lee’ for you now. I used to know even some of the shorter stories by heart. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’—I used to be able to say that. ‘‘I still memorize poems,” she says. ‘‘I know ‘The Waste Land’ by heart. ‘Prufrock.’ Yeats is good. I know a lot of poems in French by heart. A lot of Dante. That’s just something that has always come easily to me. I also know all these things that I was made to learn. I’m sort of this horrible repository of doggerel verse.

"Listen," he said, reaching for her wrist distractedly, eyes on the page of the book as he pulled her closer. Holding the Dark, the title read. By a poet named Melanie Cameron. Emeline leaned back against the shelves, watching him. " 'I didn't know it would go like this,' " he recited. " 'I didn't know I would find you in the dark...' " Emeline stared at his mouth, captivated by the cadence of his voice. His expression was hungry as he read on, as if he'd discovered some delicious secret and wanted to feed it to her. Like a ripe red strawberry dipped in chocolate. "When I lie against you with my eyes closed, I bring your body with me, into the darkness, I bring your whole body inside me. And in that darkness I know you so much better than hands and mouth can know, I know you, as though you were the darkness inside me." He glanced up from the page, fixing her in place with that same hungry gaze. Warmth pooled in her belly. "It's nice," she murmured. He raised an eyebrow. "Nice?" The corner of his mouth turned up as he lifted his hand, bracing it against the shelf beside her. She wrinkled her nose at him. "Pretty, then." "How about tender. And..." His eyes dropped to her mouth. "Intimate." There was the oddest feeling in Emeline's chest. Like a million tiny stars on the cusp of bursting. Sparks crackled in the air between them.

To-day a rude brief recitative, Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal, Of unnamed heroes in the ships—of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach, Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing, And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations, Fitful, like a surge. Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors, Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise nor death dismay. Pick'd sparingly without noise by thee old ocean, chosen by thee, Thou sea that pickest and cullest the race in time, and unitest nations, Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee, Indomitable, untamed as thee. (Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing, Ever the stock preserv'd and never lost, though rare, enough for seed preserv'd.) Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations! Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals! But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man one flag above all the rest, A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death, Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates, And all that went down doing their duty, Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old, A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o'er all brave sailors, All seas, all ships.

Eventually, the men’s talk of politics turned to poetry. The recitations could begin with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat: I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry, Half a loaf for a bite to eat, Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot, Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm. To which a voice might answer with a poem by Rumi: My arrow of love has arrived at the target I am in the house of mercy and my heart is a place of prayer. These gatherings went on for hours, with one guest after another reciting poems of the Persian masters—Rumi, Khayyam, Sa’adi, snd Hafez. That my father, the Colonel, who could make us cower with a single sidelong glance, produced the most skillful recitations both bewildered and fascinated me. His voice had a deep timbre perfectly suited to reciting verse, and the frequent cries of “Lovely!” and “Exquisite!” roused him to ever more passionate declamation. I listened from behind the window, enraptured by the music of a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song. The words hooked into me and wouldn’t let me go. Rivers, oceans, and deserts, the nightingale and the rose—the perennial symbols of Persian poetry first grew familiar to me through these late-night scenes in the garden, and even though I was still a young girl, only just a child, the verses called me away to different lands.

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Now, son, I don’t pay much mind to idle talk, never have done. But there’s a regular riptide of gossip saying you’ve got something going with that girl in the marsh.” Tate threw up his hands. “Now hold on, hold on,” Scupper continued. “I don’t believe all the stories about her; she’s probably nice. But take a care, son. You don’t want to go starting a family too early. You get my meaning, don’t you?” Keeping his voice low, Tate hissed, “First you say you don’t believe those stories about her, then you say I shouldn’t start a family, showing you do believe she’s that kind of girl. Well, let me tell you something, she’s not. She’s more pure and innocent than any of those girls you’d have me go to the dance with. Oh man, some of the girls in this town, well, let’s just say they hunt in packs, take no prisoners. And yes, I’ve been going out to see Kya some. You know why? I’m teaching her how to read because people in this town are so mean to her she couldn’t even go to school.” “That’s fine, Tate. That’s good of you. But please understand it’s my job to say things like this. It may not be pleasant and all for us to talk about, but parents have to warn their kids about things. That’s my job, so don’t get huffy about it.” “I know,” Tate mumbled while buttering a biscuit. Feeling very huffy. “Come on now. Let’s get another helping, then some of that pecan pie.” After the pie came, Scupper said, “Well, since we’ve talked about things we never mention, I might as well say something else on my mind.” Tate rolled his eyes at his pie. Scupper continued. “I want you to know, son, how proud I am of you. All on your own, you’ve studied the marsh life, done real well at school, applied for college to get a degree in science. And got accepted. I’m just not the kind to speak on such things much. But I’m mighty proud of you, son. All right?” “Yeah. All right.” Later in his room, Tate recited from his favorite poem: “Oh when shall I see the dusky Lake, And the white canoe of my dear?” •

My mother made me into the type of person who is at ease standing in the middle of moving traffic, the type of person who ends up having more adventures and making more mistakes. Mum never stopped encouraging me to try, fail and take risks. I kept pushing myself to do unconventional things because I liked the reaction I got from her when I told her what I'd done. Mum's response to all my exploits was to applaud them. Great, you're living your life, and not the usual life prescribed for a woman either. Well done! Thanks to her, unlike most girls at the time, I grew up regarding recklessness, risk-taking and failure as laudable pursuits. Mum did the same for Vida by giving her a pound every time she put herself forward. If Vida raised her hand at school and volunteered to go to an old people's home to sing, or recited a poem in assembly, or joined a club, Mum wrote it down in a little notebook. Vida also kept a tally of everything she'd tried to do since she last saw her grandmother and would burst out with it all when they met up again. She didn't get a pound if she won a prize or did something well or achieved good marks in an exam, and there was no big fuss or attention if she failed at anything. She was only rewarded for trying. That was the goal. This was when Vida was between the ages of seven and fifteen, the years a girl is most self-conscious about her voice, her looks and fitting in, when she doesn't want to stand out from the crowd or draw attention to herself. Vida was a passive child – she isn't passive now. I was very self-conscious when I was young, wouldn't raise my voice above a whisper or look an adult in the eye until I was thirteen, but without me realizing it Mum taught me to grab life, wrestle it to the ground and make it work for me. She never squashed any thoughts or ideas I had, no matter how unorthodox or out of reach they were. She didn't care what I looked like either. I started experimenting with my clothes aged eleven, wearing top hats, curtains as cloaks, jeans torn to pieces, bare feet in the streets, 1930s gowns, bells around my neck, and all she ever said was, 'I wish I had a camera.

I’m sure we can manage to tolerate each other’s company for one meal.” “I won’t say anything about farming. We can discuss other subjects. I have a vast and complex array of interests.” “Such as?” Mr. Ravenel considered that. “Never mind, I don’t have a vast array of interests. But I feel like the kind of man who does.” Amused despite herself, Phoebe smiled reluctantly. “Aside from my children, I have no interests.” “Thank God. I hate stimulating conversation. My mind isn’t deep enough to float a straw.” Phoebe did enjoy a man with a sense of humor. Perhaps this dinner wouldn’t be as dreadful as she’d thought. “You’ll be glad to hear, then, that I haven’t read a book in months.” “I haven’t gone to a classical music concert in years,” he said. “Too many moments of ‘clap here, not there.’ It makes me nervous.” “I’m afraid we can’t discuss art, either. I find symbolism exhausting.” “Then I assume you don’t like poetry.” “No . . . unless it rhymes.” “I happen to write poetry,” Ravenel said gravely. Heaven help me, Phoebe thought, the momentary fun vanishing. Years ago, when she’d first entered society, it had seemed as if every young man she met at a ball or dinner was an amateur poet. They had insisted on quoting their own poems, filled with bombast about starlight and dewdrops and lost love, in the hopes of impressing her with how sensitive they were. Apparently, the fad had not ended yet. “Do you?” she asked without enthusiasm, praying silently that he wouldn’t offer to recite any of it. “Yes. Shall I recite a line or two?” Repressing a sigh, Phoebe shaped her mouth into a polite curve. “By all means.” “It’s from an unfinished work.” Looking solemn, Mr. Ravenel began, “There once was a young man named Bruce . . . whose trousers were always too loose.” Phoebe willed herself not to encourage him by laughing. She heard a quiet cough of amusement behind her and deduced that one of the footmen had overheard. “Mr. Ravenel,” she asked, “have you forgotten this is a formal dinner?” His eyes glinted with mischief. “Help me with the next line.” “Absolutely not.” “I dare you.” Phoebe ignored him, meticulously spreading her napkin over her lap. “I double dare you,” he persisted. “Really, you are the most . . . oh, very well.” Phoebe took a sip of water while mulling over words. After setting down the glass, she said, “One day he bent over, while picking a clover.” Ravenel absently fingered the stem of an empty crystal goblet. After a moment, he said triumphantly, “. . . and a bee stung him on the caboose.” Phoebe almost choked on a laugh. “Could we at least pretend to be dignified?” she begged. “But it’s going to be such a long dinner.