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No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

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I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

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I call this the Wheel of Macmillan Collector’s Library books. 

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psithurism (n.) the sound of the leaves rustling as wind blows through the trees

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Claude Monet Vétheuil dans le brouillard, c. 1908 lithograph

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Louise Crane, Elizabeth Bishop with the her Cat, Minnow  1938

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Literary Epitaphs (Part 1)

Anne Sexton:

“Rats live on no evil star.”

John Keats:

“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Ernest Hemingway:

“Best of all he loved the fall / the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods / leaves floating on the trout streams / and above the hills the high blue windless skies…now he will be a part of them forever.”

Emily Dickinson:

“Called Back.”

Sylvia Plath:

“Even amidst fierce flames / The golden lotus can be planted.”

Allen Ginsberg:

“My heart is still, as time will tell.”

Elizabeth Bishop:

“All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

Hilda Doolittle:

“So you may say, / Greek flower; Greek ecstasy / Reclaims Forever / One who died / Following / Intricate Song’s lost Measure.”

Robert Lowell:

“The immortal is scraped / Unconsenting from the mortal.”

Virginia Woolf:

“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death! The waves broke on the shore.”

Robert Frost:

“I had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World.”

Edgar Allan Poe:

“Here, at last, he is happy.”

Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight / of being no one’s sleep under so / many lids.”

Henry Miller:

“I am going to beat those bastards,”

Dylan Thomas:

“Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea…”

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But they made me realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve.

Elizabeth Bishop (b. 8 February 1911)

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Last week, the inaugural issue of Laurel: A Literary & Arts Magazine saw the digital and physical light of day. Click on Issues to find and read the inaugural issue.

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We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

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The great William Butler Yeats passed away aged 73 today, January 28th, 1939. Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man dies in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-diggers' toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscle strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. From: Under Ben Bulben