outside in

Only when the outside is in us can it start to become material for the poem. But again, this is only a beginning, because the outside world enters everyone and not only into poets, and within each of us is that same labyrinth of paths, of which few are taken, often the same ones.

—Joan Margarit, New Letters to a Young Poet (Swan Isle Press, 2011), translated by Christopher Maurer

beautiful labyrinth

In 2004 Raymond Danowski donated 75,000 volumes of poetry to the Emory University library. Reports at the time said the collection would fill several tractor-trailers. I want to get lost in those stacks someday and not come out of that beautiful labyrinth for about a year.