The story of my life

FOR THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO

BY MARGE PIERCY

Talent is what they say

you have after the novel

is published and favorably 

reviewed. Beforehand what 

you have is a tedious

delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is that you have done

after the play is produced

and the audience claps.

Before that friends keep asking

when you are planning to go 

out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you 

had after the third volume 

of remarkable poems. Earlier

they accuse you of withdrawing

ask you you don't have a baby,

call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.'s, 

take workshops with fancy names

when all you can really

learn is a few techniques

typing instructions and some-

body else's mannerisms

is that every artist lacks

a license to hang on the wall

like your optician, your vet

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose filling fall into the stew

but you're a certified dentist.

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to 

like it better than being loved.

Here's to the young who want to...

Beauty of the Father

Nilo Cruz is quickly becoming one of my favorite playwrights. Here are some quotes from his gorgeous play, Beauty of the Father, about the ghost of the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca and his conversations with the living protagonists; a Spanish father and his American daughter.

Oscar Issac as the poet, Lorca. Courtesy of Broadway World

LORCA. 

I constantly have to remind myself that I'm only a spirit and I have to look at life from a distance and not get too involved with humanity. But the living have a way of beckoning us back to life through prayer or a work of art... and it's only natural that we respond, because as spirits we have our little sad attachments to the world, and there's always work to be done.

LORCA.

I was a fool like you. I don't remember ever finding love in life. Faces and the forms of human bodies, that's all I ever found. Love has always been a thick forest that  I've never been able to enter, and all I've known is the promise of the trees.

PAQUITA.

I met him standing in front of one of his paintings. I was looking at a picture and fell in love with him through his work.

LORCA.

You are an artist, and that's like being a father to many children. Consider the heart doctor, who has listened to more than a million heartbeats, but never really gets to understand the secret language of hearts... But you are a creator and artists sometimes tap into the mystery of all these things.

 

LORCA.

Tonight you will go to bed companionless and perhaps discontent at the violence of life, and when sleep comes, you will unwind yourself like the string of a kite in the air, then you'll feel the weightlessness of your human soul and realize that the sadness in your being when measured against the weight of the world might seem very little.

Elegance

"If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well."

"Fled is that music: --Do I wake or sleep?"

[Note: This is copied and pasted from Artemis, and it's funny to look back on this post, because I actually was chosen to direct this play! Such a wonderful experience. Anyhoo, enjoy Keats' beautiful poetry] The past two weeks of my life I have spent toiling night and day on a script analysis of Tennessee Williams' Not About Nightingales for Fundamentals of Theatre III. The final product is forty seven pages and 14,000 words of analytical goodness. The two students with the best script analysis will be chosen to direct their shows, using the other students in the class for their cast, an able bodied crew to build sets and a small budget. We find out the directors in a week, so I'll keep you all literally and figuratively posted.    Anyhoo, Here are my favorite verses from the play's namesake,    "ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE" BY: JOHN KEATS     III
Far Far away, dissolve and quite forget
What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other grown;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.   VI Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou are pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstacy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-- To thy high requiem become a sod. VIII Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream,  Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: --Do I wake or sleep?

Elegance

"We are all prisoners of our own destiny,
and must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and,
in our epilogue, must be the person we have always been deep inside,
regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime.
Just because you have been around fine linen
does not mean you are entitled to it
-- no more than a sick person is to health."

Riddle Me This #6 Answered

Here it is one more time...

I am a microcosm of the Universe
Complete with my own Starbucks
Or Five
I am pleasure without Duty
Where the paths of the world Crux
One Hive
One thousand rates
One thousand gates
One thousand emotions stir
I have thousands to Deter
I am the world over
Individual, yet exactly the Same
Enabler, you know my Name
Who am I?

 Image courtesy of Doublemind.

An Airport.

Riddle Me This #6

Once again, wrote it in AP Lit after finishing a quiz.
Please guess and leave your answer in the comments!
It will be fun, I promise :)

I am a microcosm of the Universe
Complete with my own Starbucks
Or Five
I am pleasure without Duty
Where the paths of the world Crux
One Hive
One thousand rates
One thousand gates
One thousand emotions stir
I have thousands to Deter
I am the world over
Individual, yet exactly the Same
Enabler, you know my Name
Who am I?