Rilke joins us, of course

The poetry party continues.

Aurora has written a lovely post with all manner of poetry month celebration ideas and includes this quote from Allen Ginsburg: "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does." [Ginsberg: A Biography, Barry Miles (1989)].

Isn’t it is the willingness of poets to make their private world public that gives us a chance to find ourselves related to the thoughts of another human, that affirms our own experience, that allows for the feeling of kinship that comes from sensing "yes, that’s exactly it!" as we read?

And now, a favorite poem of mine, a very favorite poet, a complex human, as are we all.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke