strike out a path

They say that poetry dies; poetry cannot die. Had she only one human brain for her asylum she would yet endure for ages, for she would burst forth like the lava of Vesuvius and strike out a path through the most prosaic realities.

—George Sand, Thoughts and Aphorisms from Her Works (Morrison & Gibb Ltd., second edition 1912), arranged by Alfred H. Hyatt

mind pain

As when reading an article on the latest subatomic theory, a good poem should hurt your brain.

vital organ

A good poem while entering the body via the brain, will lodge itself under the sternum, close by vital organs, the heart and the lungs.

went by me

I don’t mind if I miss certain allusions as they sail past me without recognition as long as they ruffle a few brain cells as they pass.

engaging tongue and ear

Tonight I read Yeats aloud for about an hour, and I shall do this. An hour in the morning and an hour at night. Up to the inventing of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after that, all reading was done aloud….Eliot says the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can….Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain which are used for vision. Not all the brain. This means a silent reader’s literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud—tongue and ear.

—Ted Hughes in a letter to Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar and Giroux, 1956), selected and edited by Christopher Reid.

blossom in the mind

As I read the poem I could feel the lines unfurl, flowering within the lobes of my brain.

getting comfortable

The poem plopped itself down in an overstuffed sofa in the folds of my brain, and made itself at home.

wring free

Imagine the brain as a sopping sponge of words. The poet tries to wring free enough drops to streak the page.

brain tattoo

The image was a brain tattoo.

cheese graters

The fashion for fragments: Another poet who has taken a cheese grater to his brain. Can you not synthesize, configure, integrate or make whole?