Clarity's Not Clear

Because at the point you can comprehend how
incomprehensible it all is,
You're about as smart as you need to be.

Suddenly I burst into song:
"Awe,
sweet mystery of life,
at last I've found thee."

And I felt so good inside
and my heart felt so full,
I decided I would set time aside each day to do
awe-robics.

Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is
about life that you don't understand,
you are closer to understanding it all
than at any other time.
— Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, from "Trudy," pp. 205-206.

Lines While Walking Home
FROM A PARTY ON CHARLES STREET

Suffer, do you? I think if wounds were art
you'd fill a gallery with scars on plaques,
extractions on a red velvet, rare amputations

stuffed and varnished and set out on mirrors
under magenta lights — then throw a party
for Jesus and Mother and Father and all Charles Street.

As for being a beast — you'll have to move outdoors.
Not conscience but the unconscious
stiffens the stallion to the dancing mare.

And one temptation by Hieronymous Bosch
over the radiator won't qualify,
even with Baudelaire propped on the table

between two coupling boys in terra cotta.
Piddle's no rape, rape's no vocabulary. One family of Sicilians

has more beasts in to breakfast than you to your nightmares.
— John Ciardi, As If: Poems New and Selected, p. 129.

Fine and dandy: but, so far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. If poetry were anything—like dropping an atombomb—which everyone did, anyone could become a poet merely by doing the necessary anything; whatever that anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet's calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. I am quite aware that, wherever our socalled civilization has slithered, there's every reward and no punishment for unbeing. But if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you—nobody else—who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth. If you can take it, take it—and be. If you can't, cheer up and go about other people's business; and do (or undo) till you drop.
— e e cummings, i   six nonlectures, nonlecture two, p. 24.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitbly earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
— e e cummings, i six nonlectures, nonlecture five, p. 91.