old new borrowed blue

For a wedding they say it’s good luck for the bride to wear ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’. This could be the model for a good poetry reading: Read something old, read something new, read something borrowed (the generous act of reading another poet’s poem), and the blue will be evident in the reading because it’s poetry.

nature and artifice

A vapour trail cuts across and above some untidy clouds, across the blue, before and after the clouds, as I look up through trees blown by a strong wind. A Gestalt centering on that intimate mixture of nature and artifice. A poem—perhaps.

—Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art: A Poetry Note-Book (Allision & Busby, 1982)