The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “poetry”

The Little-Known Visual Art of E.E. Cummings
The Little-Known Visual Art of E.E. Cummings

“Why do you paint? For exactly the same reason I breathe.”

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Having It Out with Melancholy: Amanda Palmer Reads Jane Kenyon’s Stunning Poem About Living to the Other Side of Depression
Having It Out with Melancholy: Amanda Palmer Reads Jane Kenyon’s Stunning Poem About Living to the Other Side of Depression

“What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?”

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Dangerous Myth of the Suffering Artist and What Makes Life Worth Living
Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Dangerous Myth of the Suffering Artist and What Makes Life Worth Living

A beautiful clarion call for making creative work “the filling joy of your life” no matter how difficult the cards you’ve been dealt.

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Answers in Progress: Amiri Baraka’s Lyrical Manifesto for Life
Answers in Progress: Amiri Baraka’s Lyrical Manifesto for Life

“Love all things that make you strong.”

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91-Year-Old Lebanese-American Poet, Philosopher, and Painter Etel Adnan on Memory, the Self, and the Universe
91-Year-Old Lebanese-American Poet, Philosopher, and Painter Etel Adnan on Memory, the Self, and the Universe

“The universe is itself the glue that keeps it going, therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in becoming and in being. Because it remembers itself, it exists. Because it exists, it remembers.”

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Poetry and the Revolution of Being: Jane Hirshfield on How Great Art Transforms Us
Poetry and the Revolution of Being: Jane Hirshfield on How Great Art Transforms Us

“Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?… And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.”

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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

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How to Break Up Like a Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Art of the Kind, Clean Break
How to Break Up Like a Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Art of the Kind, Clean Break

“I am most faithless when I most am true.”

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The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art
The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art

“How frail the human heart must be — a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing — a fragile, shining instrument of crystal, which can either weep, or sing.”

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What to Look for During a Total Solar Eclipse: Mabel Loomis Todd’s Poetic 19th-Century Guide to Totality, with Help from Emily Dickinson
What to Look for During a Total Solar Eclipse: Mabel Loomis Todd’s Poetic 19th-Century Guide to Totality, with Help from Emily Dickinson

“A vast, palpable presence seems overwhelming the world. The blue sky changes to gray or dull purple, speedily becoming more dusky, and a death-like trance seizes upon everything earthly.”

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