building materials

From solitude and silence, the poet erects a home.

home poem

The childhood home is the first poem. Poets should not give in and go back home too easily or too often.

poem place

A good poem dwells in the mouth while making a home in the mind.

back to basics

Stayed home, sewed his own clothes, wrote poems.

tooth and nail

An artist and a writer lived together harmoniously while their books and artwork battled for every inch of wall space.

near sighted

It was all close-to-home writing.

coming home

“But it took him a long time / finally to make up his mind to go home.” That’s the last line and a half of Bishop’s “The Prodigal.” Home, of course, is mutable, like any word or concept. But not indefinitely so. We learn from poetry of the gradual balancing of language on the exact midpoint between it-could-be-anything and it-can-only-be-this. I want to ask in this essay if I’m a poet, if that’s my “home”—but I think, for me, it’s still too early to know.

—Valerie Cornell, “On Being Unable to Read,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2000), edited by Molly McQuade.

all art

Little by little, pictures encumbered all the rooms, till only a room or two was left for the purposes of the man who required to eat, sleep, entertain his friends. Little by little the hours in which he was still the man whom he was so well, became rarer. His house was already almost a museum, his flesh and blood little more than the place where a work of art was being accomplished.

—Marcel Proust “Gustave Moreau,” Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919 (Dell Publishing Co., 1964), translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

you are here

The poet who is nomad, living everywhere and nowhere, the poet who leaves home and never comes back, and the poet who stays.

book as home

The blurb as real estate ad: Charming yet spacious, ready to move in, well-appointed, recently renovated, with water views.

presidential library

Visiting Mt. Vernon last Sunday, the tour guide was heard to say that George Washington’s library was filled with books on science, military history, and poetry.

landscape cloak

The title of Zanzotto’s first collection, Dietro il paesaggio, indicates what has become an enduring desire to indeed go behind the landscape, into it, and out upon it, to literally wrap it around the self—as is expressed in the closing lines of the poem “Ormai” (By Now), in which the landscape is conceived of as a type of protecting cloak: “Here all that’s left is to wrap the landscape around the self / and turn your back.” Zanzotto’s recognition of the total encirclement of the self by one’s surroundings reveals a deep rootedness, at once warmly familiar and yet also uneasily enclosing.

—Patrick Barron, introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (U. of Chicago Press, 2007), edited and translated by Patrick Barron.

self-enveloping space

This is all you need to know about the artist: Only her work hung on the walls of her home.

house to house

Two weeks before Christmas, a group of poets went out ‘caroling’ their poems. Some doors were slammed, but many homes welcomed them.

writing thaw

It was wonderfully warm & pleasant & the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home—I felt the winter breaking up in me & if I had been at home I should have tried to write poetry.

—Henry David Thoreau, manuscript volume 18 of the Journals

orphan line

Beautiful little orphan line, someday I’ll find a modest home for you, and you will make of it a mansion.