Food for the Spirit and the Soul

This Date in Art History: Born 4 April 1876 – Maurice de Vlaminck, a French painter.

Below – “The Gardener”; “Sailboats at Chatou”; “Woman With a Dog”; “The Table (Still Life with Almonds)”; “Poplars”; “The Girl from Rat Mort.”

This Date in Cultural History: Died 4 April 1968 – Martin Luther King Jr., an influential American civil rights activist.

Some quotes from the work of Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership… Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
“Let’s build bridges, not walls.”

Contemporary British Art – Paul Jackson

Below – “Kelton Roundhill, nr Bath”; “Thurlestone Sands, Devon”; “Nendaz, Switzerland”; “Kaufmann House, Palm Springs”; “Ibiza Villa”; “Modernist Villa Ibiza.”

A Poem for Today

“The Good-Morrow”
by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Below – Jan Van Beers: “A Love Match”

Contemporary American Art – Mollie Douthit

Below – “sculpting and following yellow and blue”; “Dairy Queen in the back of a Buick”; “obsession in therapy”; “Name that plant”; ‘I’m not sharing”; “Fish face.”

A Poem for Today

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”
by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Below – Still from the movie “Bright Star” with Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish.

Contemporary Greek Art – George-Maran Varthalitis

Below – “The red book”; “autumn”; “Guardian of the soul”; “Being and nothingness”; “Tell me the truth great harlequin”; “The Concept of truth.”

A Poem for Today

“The Cache”
by Dan Gerber

Behind the house in a field
there’s a metal box I buried
full of childhood treasure, a map
of my secret place, a few lead pennies
from 1943.
The rest I’ve forgotten,
forgotten even the exact spot
I covered with moss and loam.

Now I’m back and twenty years
have made so little difference
I suspect they never happened,
this face in the mirror
aged with pencil and putty.
I suspect even
the box has moved as a mole would move
to a new place long ago.

Contemporary American Art – Rachel Paxton

Below – “El Rancho, Dusk”; “Silver Spur, Dusk”; “Pink Motel, Noon”; “Kitty Kat Club, Dusk”; “Morning Call, Redux”; “Pussycat.”

A Poem for Today

“The Girl from Panama”
by Clemens Starck

I’m talking with Mike over coffee.
His wife recently left him. He’s lonely.
We’re both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps
plying the trade.
We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can
read a set of blueprints.
But when it comes to women . . .

I’m thinking about my mother, who is 91
and very frail. I’m thinking
about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter,
my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife,
and the girl from Panama
in the reading room of the New Orleans public library
forty-five years ago
who slipped a note to me across the table, asking:
“Are you a philosophy?”

Rain splatters against the storefront
of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent
for a long time
before going back to work.

Contemporary Portuguese Art – Anica Govedarica

Below – “Equilibrium”; “Iberian blues”; “From Lisbon neighborhood”; “Quietude”; “Sharing the morning news”; “Sunset over the lake.”

A Poem for Today

“Housewife as Poet”
by Sally Van Doren

I have scrawled audible lifelines along the edges
of the lint trap, dropping the ball of towel fuzz
in the blue bin lined with a thirteen-gallon bag.
My sons’ wardrobes lounge on their bedroom floors,
then sidle down to the basement, where I look
forward to the warmth of their waistbands
when I pluck them from the dryer.
Sometimes I wonder why my husband
worries about debt and I wish he wouldn’t.
Sometimes I wonder how high the alfalfa
will grow. Sometimes I wonder if the dog
will throw up in the night. Like my mother,
I’m learning not to tamper with anger.
It appears as reliably as the washing machine
thumps and threatens to lurch across the floor
away from the electrical outlet. Nothing’s worth
getting worked up about, except for death.
And when I think of the people I have lost,
I wish them back into their button-down shirts,
their raspberry tights.

Below – Leroy Hackett Jensen: Untitled (Woman Thinking)

Contemporary German Art – Stefanie Schneider: Part I of II.

Below (photographs) – “Memories of Love III”; “Sisyphus”; “Vegas”; “Dream Scene on Salt Lake”; “Her Last Call”; “Eavesdropping (29 Palms, CA).”

Contemporary German Art – Stefanie Schneider: Part II of II.

Below (photographs) – “Renee’s Dream XII”; “Renee’s Dream XV”; “Thunderbifd Motel”; “Stefanie on bed looking quite dead (29 Palms, CA)”; “Palm Tree Restaurant”; “Ghosts.”

A Poem for Today

“Three Deer in Oquossoc”
By Sonja Johanson

East will take me back. I drive
west. I wend between snowbanks,
until the road delivers me
to a sleeping boat launch.

They stand on the frozen ramp;
watch me with coats that are
better than mine. Ice houses
and snowmobiles edge the distance.

‘I have to turn around,’ I say
to them, ‘I went the wrong
way.’ They stamp and chuff.
‘No,’ they tell me, ‘this is the way.’

Art for Today: Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851 – 1929) was an Italian painter.

Below – “Shepherdess”; “Spring in Francavilla”; “Landscape with Shepherds”; “Springtime and Love”; “Odalisque”; “Self-Portrait.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 2 April 1805 – Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish novelist short story writer, playwright, poet, and author of some of the world’s’ most memorable fairy tales.

Some quotes from the work of Hans Christian Andersen:

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, To gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.”
“Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.”
“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”
“The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most.”
“To be of use to the world is the only way to be happy.”
“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”

This Date in Art History: Born 2 April 1827 – William Holman Hunt, an English painter.

Below – “Amaryllis”: “Asparagus Island”; “May Morning on Magdalen College Tower, Oxford”; “Our English Coasts”; “The Lady of Shalott”; “Self-Portrait.”

A Poem for Today

“Exit Glacier”
by Peggy Shumaker

we could hear

rivers inside the ice
heaving splits

the groaning of a ledge
about to

calve. Strewn in the moraine
fresh moose sign—

tawny oblong pellets
breaking up

sharp black shale. In one breath
ice and air—

history, the record
of breaking—

prophecy, the warning
of what’s yet to break

out from under
four stories

of bone-crushing turquoise
retreating.

Contemporary Hungarian Art – Paula Goddard

Below (photographs) – “Isle of Flightless Birds”; “Little Women – Memories”; “Visitors IV”; “The Classic Series – I”; “House of Gold”; Untitled.

This Date in Literary/Intellectual History: Born 2 April 1947 – Camille Paglia, an American social critic and author of “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.”

Some quotes from the work of Camille Paglia:

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. ‘I’m this way because my father made me this way. I’m this way because my husband made me this way.’ Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.”
“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”
“I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society’s care.”
“The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.”
“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.”
“Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.”
“We must accept our pain, change what we can and laugh at the rest.”

Contemporary Canadian Art – Ramona Nordal

Below – “Cherry Cola”; “Giant Study”; “Thrush”; “Fader”; “Little Darling”; “Frida Study.”

A Poem for Today

“Growing Apples”
by Nancy Miller Gomez

There is big excitement in C block today.
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.

Greeting April

Below – Ilya Lerner: “Covered bridge in April”

Art for April – Svitlana Tykhomyrova: “April oasis”

Musings in Spring: Ruth Stout

“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.”

Below – Vincent van Gogh: “Woman Walking in a Garden”

Art for April – Marina Startseva: “April”

A Poem for April

“April”
by Sara Teasdale

The roofs are shining from the rain.
The sparrows twitter as they fly,
And with a windy April grace
The little clouds go by.

Yet the back-yards are bare and brown
With only one unchanging tree–
I could not be so sure of Spring
Save that it sings in me.

Below – Philip Knaggs: “Sparrows in a Tree”

Art for April: John Lowrie Morrison: “Evening Light over Isle of Gigha”

Musings in April: T. S. Eliot

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

Below – Charles Anderson: “April Is the Cruelest Month”

Art for April – Gritsenko Olga: “April Morning”

This Date in Art History: Died 1 April 1995 – Lucie Rie, an English potter.

Below – Thrown vase; Footed bowl; Swan-necked vase; Uranium Yellow Bowl with Bronze Lip; Bottle Vase with Flaring Lip; Pouring Vessel.

Art for April – Hatti Pattisson: “April”

Musings in April: Charles Lamb

“Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.”

Art for April – Marisa Anon: “April Florals II”

A Poem for April

“April”
by Louise Gluck

No one’s despair is like my despair–

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.

Below – Daniel Ridgway Knight: “Normandy Girl Sitting in a Garden”

Art for April – Vicky Tesmer: “April sky after a Storm”

This Date in Literary History: Born 1 April 1929 – Milan Kundera, an award-winning Czech-born French novelist, poet, playwright, and author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Some quotes from the work of Milan Kundera:

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. ““The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”
“The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
“The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.”
“Beauty is a rebellion against time.”
“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”
“To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”

Art for April – Paulina Krajewska: “april&forest”

Musings in April: William Shakespeare

“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

Below – Joan Justis: “Children’s Garden”

Art for April – Hodaya Louis: “April’s Sun”

A Poem for April

“Song  of a Second April”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,
Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun,
Pensively,—only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

Below – Faith Aslan: “Lonely Woman”

Art for April – Zhongwen Yu: “I think you are the April of this world”

Musings in April: Ellis Peters

“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.”

Below – Paul Ledent: “Field Flowers”

Art for April – Claude Monet: “Poppy Field”

A Poem for April

“An April Night”
by Lucy Maud Montgomery

The moon comes up o’er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o’-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Below Breten Bryden: “Moon over Marsh Cape Cod Landscape”

Art for April – Arthur Hughes: “April Love”

Welcome, Wonderful April

Below – Lara Vald: “April”

This Date in Art History: Born 31 March 1885 – Jules Pascin, a Bulgarian painter.

Below – “Portrait of Mimi Laurent”; “Young Woman at a Cafe”; “Mija”; “Portriat of Lucy Krohg”; “Genevieve with a Garland of Flowers”;
“Model in Front of Mirror.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 31 March 2016 – Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some quotes from the work of Imre Kertesz:

“As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up before us. By the time we learn everything, we slowly come to understand it. And while you come to understand everything gradually, you don’t remain idle at any moment: you are already attending to your new business; you live, you act, you move, you fulfill the new requirements of every new step of development. If, on the other hand, there were no schedule, no gradual enlightenment, if all the knowledge descended on you at once right there in one spot, then it’s possible neither your brains nor your heart could bear it.”
“The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.”
“Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.”
“I refuse to adapt or integrate myself.”
“I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that’s just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.”
“I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.”
“One is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something.”

This Date in Art History: Died 31 March 2012 – Alberto Bughi, an Italian painter.

Below – “At the end of the day”; “Guests’ entry”; “Figures standing”; “The clerks”; “Man with dog”; “City by night.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 31 March 1855 – Charlotte Bronte, an English novelist, poet, and author of “Jane Eyre.”

Some quotes from the work of Charlotte Bronte:

“What you want to ignite in others must first burn inside yourself.”
“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”
“Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.”
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”
“A great deal; you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way; they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should – so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”
“There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”

Below – A portrait of Charlotte Bronte by George Richmond.

This Date in Art History: Died 31 March 2014 – Roger Somville, a Belgian painter.

Below – “Young woman and fruit tray”; “Two women in an interior”; “Bust of a woman”; “Simone with a bouquet of flowers”; “Head of a woman”; “Woman.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 31 March 1914 – Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature: Part I of II.

Some quotes from the work of Octavio Paz:

“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death.” “The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.”
“The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.”
“Deserve your dream.”
“The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.”
“Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.”
“Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.”
“The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships “getting things done” but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.”
“Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.”
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
“Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.”
“The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, ‘Not Yet,’ and thus denies us… Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present.”
“To love is to undress our names.”
“Light is time thinking about itself.”
“To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see.”
“Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.”

This Date in Art History: Died 31 March 2017 – James Rosenquist, an American painter who worked in the pop art genre.

Below – “House of Fire”; “Cold Light”; “Spinning Faces in Space”;
Untitled; “Mirage Morning”; “Silver Skies.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 31 March 1914 – Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature: Part II of II.

“No More Cliches”
by Octavio Paz

Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.

Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.

How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To you manufacture fantasy.

But today I won’t make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.

This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.

This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Everyday with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.

Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.

From now on, my head won’t look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.

Below – Renee Spierdijk: “Daniella”

This Date in Art History: Born 30 March 1853 – Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch painter.

Below – “Wheatfield with Crows”; “The Starry Night”; “Pink Peach Tree in Blossom”; “Starry Night Over the Rhone”; “The Night Cafe”; “Painter on the Road to Tarascon.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 30 March 2005 – Robert Creeley, an award-winning American poet, novelist, and essayist: Part I of II.

Some quotes from the work of Robert Creeley:

“The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.”
“What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking.”
Locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being.”
“Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information.”
“My nature is a quagmire
of unresolved confessions.”
“Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill.”
“O love, where are you leading me now?”
“I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.”
“It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in the wood.”

Art for Today: Leonard Craske (1880-1950), an American sculptor.

Below – “Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial”; “The Joy of Life”; “Figure”; “Sitting German Shepherd”; “Pan and Psyche.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 30 March 2005 – Robert Creeley, an award-winning American poet, novelist, and essayist: Part II of II.

“The Rain”
by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent–
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

This Date in Art History: Died 30 March 1966 – Maxfield Parrish, an American painter and illustrator.

Below – “The Dinky Bird”; “The Lantern Bearers”; “Daybreak”; “Ecstasy”; “Hill Top Farm, Winter”; “White Birch.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 30 March 1967 – Jean Toomer, an American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and author of “Cane”: Part I of II.

Some quotes from the work of Jean Toomer:

“We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.”
“Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.”
“Most novices picture themselves as masters – and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.”
“To understand a new idea, break an old habit.”
“We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.”
“The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.”
“Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.”
“One may receive the information but miss the teaching.”
“Once a man has tasted creative action, then thereafter, no matter how safely he schools himself in patience, he is restive, acutely dissatisfied with anything else. He becomes as a lover to whom abstinence is intolerable.”
“No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.”
“We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them.”
“People mistake their limitations for high standards.”
“There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death.”
“We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.”
“Perhaps . . . our lot on the earth is to seek and to search. Now and again we find just enough to enable us to carry on. I now doubt that any of us will completely find and be found in this life.”

Contemporary Italian Art – Sanja Milenkovic

Below – “Drops”; “Eyeshot”; “Open your eyes”; “Scout”; “Sunset on The Grand Canyon”; “Rain under the sun.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 30 March 1967 – Jean Toomer, an American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and author of “Cane”: Part II of II.

“Tell Me”
by Jean Toomer

Tell me, dear beauty of the dusk,
When purple ribbons bind the hill,
Do dreams your secret wish fulfill,
Do prayers, like kernels from the husk

Come from your lips? Tell me if when
The mountains loom at night, giant shades
Of softer shadow, swift like blades
Of grass seeds come to flower. Then

Tell me if the night winds bend
Them towards me, if the Shenandoah
As it ripples past your shore,
Catches the soul of what you send.

This Date in Art History: Died 29 March 1891 – Georges Seurat, a French painter.

Below – “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”; “The Circus”; “Bathers at Asnieres”; “Gray weather, Grande Jatte”; “A View of Fort Samson”; “Models.”

A Poem for Today

“I So Liked Spring”
by Charlotte Mew

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here;-
The thrushes too-
Because it was these you so liked to hear-
I so liked you.

This year’s a different thing,-
I’ll not think of you.
But I’ll like the Spring because it is simply spring
As the thrushes do.

This Date in Art History: Died 29 March 1906 – Slava Raskaj, a Croatian painter.

Below – “Tree in Snow”; “A view of Ozalj”; “Flowers”; “Lopoci II”; “Still Life”; “Self Portrait.”

A Poem for Today

“The Secret”
by John Clare

I loved thee, though I told thee not,
Right earlily and long,
Thou wert my joy in every spot,
My theme in every song.
And when I saw a stranger face
Where beauty held the claim,
I gave it like a secret grace
The being of thy name.
And all the charms of face or voice
Which I in others see
Are but the recollected choice
Of what I felt for thee.

Below – Vincent van Gogh: “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”

Contemporary Russian Art – Anna Tivik

Below – “Kiss”; “Candy”; “Green asia”; “Diamonds.”

A Poem for Today

“With a Coat”
by Dante Di Stefano

I was cold and leaned against the big oak tree
as if it were my mother wearing a rough apron
of bark, her upraised arms warning of danger.
Through those boughs and leaves I saw
dark patches of sky. I thought a brooding
witch waited to catch me up from under
branches and take me, careening on her broom,
to her home in the jaundiced moon.
I looked to the roof of mom and dad’s house
and wondered if the paisley couch patterns
would change during the day. My brother peeked
from a window and waved. When the bus came,
I pawed away from the trunk, fumbled,
and took my first step toward not returning.

Contemporary Ukrainian Art – Dmytro Bryzhak

Below – “Fox”; “Morn”; “White light”; “Emerald berry”; “Expression”; “Rizada.”

A Poem for Today

“You are Tired (I Think)”
by E.E. Cummings

You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we’ll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I’ll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I’ll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.

This Date in Art History: Died 28 March 1985 – Marc Chagall, a Russian-French painter.

Below – “Still-life”; “The Fiddler”; “Bella with White Collar”; “The Circus Horse”; “To My Betrothed”; “The Village.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 28 March 2012 – Harry Crews, an American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist. In the words of one writer,”Harry Crews’s work has become synonymous with the genre Grit Lit.” One critic describes works in this genre “as typically blue collar or working class, mostly small town, sometimes rural, occasionally but not always violent, usually but not necessarily southern.”

Some quotes from the work of Harry Crews:

“I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”
“Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. … It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.”
“There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.”
“What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.”
“Survival is triumph enough.”
“I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”
“That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.”

This Date in Art History: Born 28 March 1922 – Grace Hartigan, an American painter.

Below – “Black Clock (After Cezanne)”; “Miami Senoritas”; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; “St. Croix Interior”; “Follies ’27”; “Renaissance Costumes.”

A Poem for Today

“Bakery of Lies”
by Judith Askew

My favorite is the cream puff lie,
the kind inflated with hot air,
expanded to make an heroic-sized story.

Another is the cannoli, a long lie,
well-packed with nutty details,
lightly wrapped in flakey truth.

A macaroon isn’t a little white lie,
but it’s covered
with self-serving coconut.

The apple tart carries slices
of sour gossip, only
slightly sweetened with truth.

Then there’s the napoleon,
an Iago lie of pernicious intent,
layer upon layer of dark deceit.

This Date in Art History: Died 28 March 2006 – Pro Hart, an Australian painter.

Below – “Fence Scape”; “Racetrack”; “Trees in Landscape”; “The Folly of the TAB (One Tree Race)”; “Broken Gate with Rabbit”; “The New Bikes.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 28 March 1908 – Nelson Algren, an American novelist, short story writer, author of “The Man with the Golden Arm,” and recipient of the National Book Award.

“Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.”
“Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”
“He said, with sort of a little derisive smile, ‘How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.’”
“Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
“Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.”
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Contemporary French Art – Claire Biette

Below – “printemps”; “La belle vie”; “Mystere”; “une lumière sur mon chemin”; “symphone.”

A Poem for Today

“Aquarium, February”
by Liz Ahl

When ice outside makes daggers of the grass,
I come to where the tides of life still flow.
The water here still moves behind the glass.

In here, the seasons never seem to pass—
the sullen shark and rays still come and go.
Outside the ice makes daggers of the grass

and coats the roads. The meditative bass
won’t puzzle how the blustery blizzards blow.
The water here still moves. Behind the glass,

rose-tinted corals house a teeming mass
of busy neon creatures who don’t know
“outside.” The ice makes daggers of the grass

and oily puddles into mirrors. Gas
freezes in its lines; my car won’t go,
but water here still moves behind the glass.

No piles of valentines, no heart held fast—
just sea stars under lights kept soft and low.
Outside, the ice makes daggers of the grass;
in here, the water moves behind the glass.

This Date in Art History: Born 27 March 1852 – Jan van Beers, a Belgian painter and illustrator.

Below – “The Letter”; “Portrait of a young woman”; “In the hammock”; “With thoughts of him”; “Portrait of a noble woman”; “A balcony.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 March 1926 – Frank O’Hara, an American poet and recipient of the National Book Award (shared).

“Morning”
By Frank O’Hara

I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death

in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes

I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine

although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you’d be proud of

the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial

there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go

Below – Burak Sezer: “Lonely Man”

This Date in Art History: Born 27 March 1875 – Albert Marquet, a French painter.

Below – “Girl Embroidering, Seated in a Garden”; “Village Cafe”; “The Coffeepot”; “House at Saint-Tropez”; “Street Lamp, Arcueil”; “Bouquet of Flowers.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 27 March 2012 – Adrienne Rich, an American poet, essayist, and recipient of the National Book Award.

“Prospective Immigrants Please Note”
by Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Contemporary American Art – Susan J Chen

Below (photographs) – “Sleeping Beauty”; “Alice”; “The Frog Prince”; “Little Red Riding Hood”; “Making America Great Again.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 March 1923 – Louis Simpson, a Jamaican-American poet, translator, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize: Part I of II.

“Working Late”
by Louis Simpson

A light is on in my father’s study.
“Still up?” he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
and the creak of coconut boughs.

He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.

Once he passed a brass curtain rod
through a head made out of plaster
and showed the jury the angle of fire–
where the murderer must have stood.
For years, all through my childhood,
if I opened a closet . . . bang!
There would be the dead man’s head
with a black hole in the forehead.

All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey
beyond the harbor and the lighthouse
at Port Royal, turning away
from land to the open sea.

Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,
she is still the mother of us all.
I can see the drifting offshore lights,
black posts where the pelicans brood.

And the light that used to shine
at night in my father’s study
now shines as late in mine.

Contemporary Spanish Art – Oscar Alvarez

Below – “Romantic 18”; “16 – Beach”; “Free Horses 6”; “White and blue”; “C-23”; “Vaquero 35”; “Walks through the sky – 20”; “20 – Beach.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 March 1923 – Louis Simpson, a Jamaican-American poet, translator, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize: Part II of II.

“Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain”
by Louis Simpson

. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
Ortega y Gasset
Neither on horseback nor seated,
But like himself, squarely on two feet,
The poet of death and lilacs
Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive
Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama
And the girl who played the piano?
Where are you, Walt?
The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?
These houses built of wood sustain
Colossal snows,
And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet did I not warn you that it was Myself
I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me?
I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.
Yet I am happy, because you found me out.”
A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,
The Bay mists clearing,
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

This Date in Art History: Died 26 March 1979 – Beauford Delaney, an American painter.

Below – “Can Fire in the Park”; Untitled; “Greene Street”; “Greenwich Village”; Untitled; Untitled.

This Date in Literary History: Died 26 March 1979 – Jean Stafford, an American short story writer, novelist, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Some quotes from the work of Jean Stafford:

“To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience.”
“For all practical purposes I left home when I was 7.”
“She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar and to console one another in the most maudlin fashion over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey, to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, they were no longer alone.”
“He whirled round and round in his rapid love; it pricked him on the breastbone like a needle. He wanted to be shut up in a small space to think about it. He wanted to grab it and eat it like an apple so that nobody else could have it.”
“I fell in love with Caligula and now I’m married to Calvin.”
“For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that my life holds nothing for me but being a writer.”

Contemporary British Art – Naomi Vona

In the words of one writer, “Naomi Vona, is an Italian artist based in London. The artist defines herself as an ‘archival parasite, with no bad intentions’. Her works combines different interests like photography, collages and illustration.”

Below – “Sguardi Neri Sotto Cieli Neri 001”; “Text Me A Texture”; “Gentleman 001.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 26 March 2015 – Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet, translator, psychologist, and recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The Stones”
by Tomas Transtromer
translated by Patty Crane

The stones we have thrown I hear
fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley
confused actions of the moment
fly howling from tree-top
to tree-top, quieting
in air thinner than now’s, gliding
like swallows from mountain-top
to mountain-top till they
reach the furthest plateaus
along the edge of existence. Where
all our deeds fall
glass-clear
to no ending
except ourselves.

Contemporary American Art – Lisa Krannichfeld

Below – “Expose”; “Jacket (in shades of blue)”; “Limelight”; “I’ve Played Nice”; “Striped Sweater (in black and yellow).”

This Date in Literary History: Born 26 March 1942 – Erica Jong, an award-winning American novelist, satirist, poet, and author of “Fear of Flying.”

Some quotes from the work of Erica Jong:

“Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.”
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
“You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.”
“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.”
“Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.”
“As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps.”
“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

Contemporary American Art – Drew Doggett

Below (photographs) – “Winter’s Cover”; “Protector”; “Luminary”; “Point Reyes”; “Divine Messenger”; “A Moment in Time.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 26 March 1930 – Gregory Corso, an American poet of the Beat Generation.

“The Mad Yak”
by Gregory Corso

I am watching them churn the last milk they’ll ever get from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his — I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they’ll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!

Contemporary American Art – Maria Folger: Part I of II.

Below – “Sun Kiss”; “Love”; Untitled; “Love”; Untitled.

This Date in Literary History: Died 26 March 2016 – Jim Harrison, an American poet, novelist, and essayist.

Some quotes from the work of Jim Harrison:

“The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.”
“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
“In a life properly lived, you’re a river.”
“The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.”
“Death steals everything except our stories.”
“Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That’s the main content. The biggest thing in people’s lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.”
“We Are All One. When we allow ourselves to become aware of this statement in its purest form, we open the doors to reveal the oneness of being. Using the process of conscious evolution we begin to recognise our true underlying identity, for once we have glimpsed the existence of this realm, we then begin to reveal what it is . . . . our true natural state.”
“The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That’s why I ran to the woods.”
“Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”
“I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don’t know what.”

Contemporary American Art – Maria Folger: Part II of II.

Below – “The Beach”; “Polka dots”; Untitled; “Normal”; “Be Happy.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 26 March 1859 – A. E. Housman, an English poet.

“To an Athlete Dying Young”
by A. E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Contemporary Italian Art – Carmelita Iezzi

Below (photographs) – “Write me a poem of silence”; “Poem of silence”; “Meraki”; “The silence of the words”; “El Último Aliento Del Invierno”; “Surreal winter.”

This Date in Literary/Cultural History: Born 26 March 1904 – Joseph Campbell, an influential American mythologist and author of many excellent books, including “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

Some quotes from the work of Joseph Campbell:

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
“Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.”
“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
“You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.”
“We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger’s lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.”
“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

Contemporary Ukrainian Art – Dina Filatov: Part I of II.

Below – “Old School”; “An Altar of Birds. The Sparrow is static”; “Teenager”; “Children QR”; “Saint business.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 26 March 1892 – Walt Whitman, an American poet, essayist, and journalist.

Verse 52 from “Song of Myself”
By Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
 But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Contemporary Ukrainian Art – Dina Filatov: Part II of II.

Below – “They Are Coming”; “Only Lambs, only to Heaven”; “Zeus”; “An Altar of Birds. The tit is eager for knowledge.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 26 March 1874 – Robert Frost, an American poet and four-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.