a shandean commonplace book

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen

Bang your tambourine!  kiss my ass, don’t mind if they say it’s vicious—they don’t know what music should do to you.   Now, while the drums are whacking away and your blond eyes stammer like two kinds of topaz knocking together, we’ll wear out all the instruments they usually beg with—the hand-organ and ocarina and dirtied trumpet—and brighten them up!  In the midst of these mad cholers where love becomes all that’s serious we’ll cling like hunks of voluptuous driftwood, our heart for a sail, the sea will sigh with relief and end its moan to clap us as happy kids! savages ripe from the trees. Frank O’Hara

Make books your companions. Let your bookshelves be your gardens. Judah Ibn Tibbon

So it was with the suitcase left in front of the hotel — cinched, broken-locked, papered with world ports, carrying what mattered until then, when turning your back to cup a match it was taken, and the thief, expecting valuables instead found books written between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing and the chronicle of your country’s final hours. What, by means of notes, you hoped to become: a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns: swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost in a hospital gown, and here your voice, principled, tender, soughing through a fence woven with pine boughs: Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope . Dear one, who even in speaking is silent, for years I have searched, usually while asleep, when I have found the suitcase open, collecting ...

Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless. Lech Walesa

is different from the poem that is not written, or the many that are never finished—those boats lost in the fog, adrift in the windless latitudes, the charts useless, the water gone. In the poem that cannot be written there is no danger, no ponderous cargo of meaning, no meaning at all.  And this is its splendor, this is how it becomes an emblem, not of failure or loss, but of the impossible. So the wind rises.  The tattered sails billow, and the air grows sweeter. A green island appears. Everyone is saved. Lawrence Raab

Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost. Marie Howe