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"When the wound is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and Ascendance require the same work."

Terrance Hayes, from "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin"

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". . . the poet is truly the thief of fire."

Arthur Rimbaud, from a letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871

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“You have to really be broken in order to be a poet. It’s a very bad thing to tell a young person, but it’s true. Poetry comes out of all the places where you break.”

Alice Notley, from an interview with BOMB magazine, September 15, 2015

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". . . I also have nature and art and poetry, and if that isn’t enough, what is?"

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo, January 1874

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"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."

William Blake, from a letter to Reverend John Trusler, August 1799

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"Love is the last light spoken."

Dylan Thomas, from "Ceremony After A Fire Raid"

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“In November, the trees are standing all sticks and bones. Without their leaves, how lovely they are, spreading their arms like dancers. They know it is time to be still.”

Cynthia Rylant, In November

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"You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you."

David Whyte, from "Sweet Darkness"

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"I want to know if you know how to melt Into that fierce heat of living Falling toward the center of your longing."

David Whyte, from " Self Portrait"

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"into the coppery halls of beech and intricate oak to be close to the trees as they whisper together let fall their leaves, and we die for the winter"

Katherine Towers, "Whim Wood"

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"The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky;"

W. B. Yeats, from "The Wild Swans at Coole"

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