"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry"
- John Andrew Holmes
About this Quote
This quote by John Andrew Holmes speaks with the power of literature and the charm of language. It recommends that checking out something beautiful can make us feel alive and connected to the world around us. Checking out can be a type of escapism, permitting us to check out various worlds and ideas. It can also be a way to get in touch with our own feelings and experiences. The quote recommends that when we read, we can be available to the sudden flashes of poetry that can be found in the circulation of language. Reading can be a way to appreciate the charm of language and to find minutes of joy and inspiration. Reading can be a way to explore our own thoughts and feelings, and to find minutes of beauty and connection in the words we read.
"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry"
"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going"
"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that"
