Welcome
It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity. And when we hear a nightingale, we hear the pause and the rich, piercing rhythm of recollection, the perfected past. The lark may sound sad, but with the lovely lapsing sadness that is almost a swoon of hope. The nightingale’s triumph is a pæan, but a death-pæan.
So it is with poetry.
D.H. Lawrence, New Poems, 1919
In the preface of this book, D.H. Lawrence wrote about poetry being a voice of the infinite future, exquisite and ethereal, a voice of the infinite past, rich and magnificent, and a voice of the immediate present, where there is no perfection, no consummation and nothing finished. He said it was where “the strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon”…. and, where life, the ever-present, knows no finality.
This passage made me think about poetry differently, more spherically and iridescently in some ways and with infinitely more depth in others.
And so, along with my own poetry, I’ll share many of the poems that continue to inspire me through this journey in the hopes they will engage you and perhaps give you some measure of inspiration too.
Shelley Ann Vrgleski 