More than I have done

"I am in full possession of accumulated resources--I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more--to do much more--than I have done. The way to do it... is to strike as many notes, deep, full, and rapid as one can... Go on, my boy, and strike hard... Try everything, do everything, render everything--be an artist, be distinguished, to the last." --Henry James

Re: rejection

"This is an eventual--and for me, unforeseen--peril of getting published in the first place, and throws light on a paradox about the life of a writer: Whereas the private undertaking of our art requires us to cultivate high sensitivity--a dependably thin skin--the public art of producing and marketing that art requires a hide of bovine thickness." --M. Allen Cunningham

Elia

"The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It's to survive as yourself, undiminished." --Elia Kazan

Continuation

"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people." --Thich Nhat Hanh

No loss

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." --Madeleine L'Engle

Macaroni on a paper plate

It's the birthday of poet and essayist Robert Pinsky, born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1940), who said, "I grew up in a disorderly, unpredictable household, jangling alternations of comedy and history, insanity and idealism, doubt and head injury, music and anger, loss and wit." He's the author of 19 books, including his poetry collections Jersey Rain (2000), Samurai Song (2001), and Gulf Music: Poems (2007). Recent works include Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (2009), a collection of essays; and Death and the Powers, a libretto for composer Tod Machover.

He's been asked many times how he got started as a poet, and has variously answered: "Imitating Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Frost, Eliot"; "Reading the dictionary and daydreaming about the sounds of words when I was a kid"; "Liking entertaining people when playing the saxophone as a teenager." And another time: "Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator — that has always been strong in me."

Bus Boy

O teenage bus boy of the summer dusk!
Lugging your gray tub of swill,
bathed in slop and ooze and bits of spaghetti
in the alley behind the Applebee's—
hate me if you will,

as I pass by in my tennis shorts and Obama t-shirt
with a vibrant, dark-haired woman,
on my way to watch game three
of the NBA finals at our local microbrewery.

Hate me, but you cannot know
that I once labored as you do now, at a Big Boy
in Riverside, California, elbow deep
in the very same lumpish goop and ooze.

Like you, I was of the slime of alleys,
of the same immemorial cigarette butts
and rotting cottage cheese.
And like you,

I dreamed of a certain waitress,
and of driving a fork into the forehead
of the night manager,
and of spitting in the soup
of plump, complacent, well-dressed diners
who snapped their fingers at me.

But most of all I dreamed of being clean,
and cool, and never, ever again
slogging through the world's filth and stink,

which is something I have achieved,
as must be perfectly obvious to you.

--George Bilgere