The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest. This poem from another of America’s greatest modernist poets looks to the stars for its subject – and, specifically, the constellations. Whilst Orion’s sword glistens and the serpent writhes, all is peaceful and calm on earth. Breathing is one of those essential things that we literally cannot do without. A bit like food – except that you can survive longer without food than you can without breathing! There are a lot of poems about food and drink, right? So what about the poems about breathing? My mouth still open, my lungs still closed, still screaming, still burning, still tightening in their involuntary way—breathing air that isn’t there, air that they know is there, available to them at their whim. I open my lungs.

Well, look no further – we’ve got a real treasure trove for you! Poetry can be fun and enjoyable to read, but did you know that reading poetry – either out loud or in your head – can actually benefit your life in many other ways too? When I’m giving a poetry reading, my breathing is more planned. I’m not a trained actor, so I can’t go on for much more than about twenty to twenty-five syllables without taking in some air. If I’m reciting a poem whose line endings are pronounced, I will usually choose to breathe at the end of lines, though, unless the poem employs especially long lines, this will usually be every two or three lines rather than at the end of each one. More commonly, where I choose to breathe will simply be at a punctuation mark that suits a slightly longer pause, a pause which may well fall in the middle of the line and not at its end. The poem, with its recurring refrain to ‘sleep safe till tomorrow’, might be thought of as a lullaby. The following three poems show a range of the vocabularies and images BE members used, to foreground themselves and their conditions:The group worked with metaphor, to bring their experiences into relief. Finding the right image for your own perspective can be very empowering, not least because it helps patients to differentiate themselves from one another and avoid being either silenced or ‘pigeon-holed’: whilst one BE member felt her body was ‘a clever machine’, another felt hers was more of ‘a wombat’. We drew on the work of Julia Darling, using in particular her poems ‘Too Heavy’ and ‘Ways of Discussing My Body’. The aim was to carry on Julia’s work in developing new vocabularies for pain and illness, to promote understanding and empathy. The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. Rhythm, cadence, intonation, punctuation, line endings, pauses, breath. The writer in conventionally punctuated metrical form can play them with or against each other, let them act in unison or in counterpoint and syncopation. It’s a far more sophisticated treatment of breath and line than anything in Olson. So I feel justified in contending that, while Olson-style free verse was new – it shook things up and helped people, including Olson himself, write some valuable poems they would not have written in the old way and added to the range of stylistic possibilities available to poets – what Olson was advocating was ultimately an unwieldy if exciting new fashion, not a technical advance. In Hopkins “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire,” it is as if he were conducting a class in the perfect utilization of prosody and alliteration, so rhapsodically sonorous are his rhymes. And lo and behold, while we are yet basking and bathing in the lush cornucopia of sounds, the poet has provided for our amusement, we are rewarded for our attention, with the noblest of sentiments hidden behind his words so fitly spoken.

And when she mentions nine gates, one is reminded that the human and animal bodies also have nine gates, or openings. The eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the organs of procreation and elimination. Now, it may not have been her intent to indicate this line of reasoning, but such is poetry. Subject to a diverse array of meanings, peculiar to the individual reader. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2838. The reading of ‘The Yachts’ is at 19.50–22.10. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. The tremor on the rippled pool of memory That from each smell in widening circles goes, The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it? An angel has no nose. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

You can also do the "base line" test you might have done when you started to see if you notice a change. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t notice much of a change. This takes a little time, as any muscle conditioning does. The word patience means “to endure” or “to bear”. It can also mean “to wait for”, “to tolerate”, or “to put up with”. In Buddhism, mindfulness is defined as being aware of what is happening right now. It is not thinking about the past or worrying about the future. It is simply being present in the moment. When we use mindfulness poetry to cultivate patience, we learn to wait and be aware in the present moment, so we can truly experience it and gain the benefits of life. Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

Thought is deepened by conversation. The poetry of spiritual dialogue sometimes takes the form of the one-sided conversation we call prayer—when not reduced to convention, a communication of the most pressing kind. In other poems, a dramatized dialogue appears. The writer, of course, knows that he or she inhabits both sides, yet by entering into the language of interchange reaches for a knowledge undiscoverable in any other way. Oh, winds of winter! List ye there To many a deep and dying groan; Or start, ye demons of the midnight air, At shrieks and thunders louder than your own. We are use to all kinds of escaping - all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. Deep breathing is very important – it helps us get plenty of oxygen, plus it can really help with calming the mind and any anxieties or worries that we may have. Aviram, Amittai F. 1994. Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.The longing for deepened connection may also be expressed as deftly and lightly as in this haiku by Basho: The book says: "He put the pen downand turned and watched her readingthe part about herself falling in love. Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. jAvoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of Buddhist awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted. Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying, Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear, High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal Huge Principles appear.

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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She composed her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ This Japanese poem not only has such imagery to it, but carries a larger meaning of the Buddhist Awakening. Stating that you wind something too tight nothing will be able to get in, no light, no wind, nothing. In Buddhism it is about feeling and living, so being wound too tight one does not allow themselves to feel emotions and let anything in which is what we need in our human lives. Well, all this is speculation. When I read this poem, to others or to myself, I am touched somewhere very deep within, somewhere where I both hurt and hope, and can’t explain. Even more at the end: what can I make of the last stanza of “Desdichada”? It is even more mysterious than its first two stanzas, as it shifts from a “you” to a “him” who may be the lover, or death, and a set of images perhaps too ambiguous to untangle: The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.