These fragments have I shored against my ruin

T. S. Eliot  Murder in the Cathedral

This is one moment
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. 

"I started to cry ...
So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.
... I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, and that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. " 

Jeanette Winterson 2011
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jonathan Cape, London
p. 39

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/ 

Diary of a Bad Year

"The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible."

J. M Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year
2007 
Text Publishing, Melbourne
p. 22

David Rowbotham

"You know, when I was a young boy, I didn't know what to call what was inside of me . . . now I know it was poetry."

  "a rebellious boy in patched pants sitting in the apricot tree staring out at a world I could never enter in any other way than by scribbling poems and stories in my exercise book".

 Malouf, an old friend of Rowbotham, on reading two small volumes published in 2005 (The Brown Island and The Cave in the Sky) wrote to Rowbotham praising the work. "These poems seem to me to have a new transparency and ease, and nobility and quality of immediate memorability that really is the sort of achievement that only comes to a poet, if it comes at all, when he has freed himself of everything except what needs now to be said."

His daughter Jill, a journalist with The Australian, recalls that in has last years he was "virtually blind but wrote daily using giant print on an enormous computer screen". At 86, inside the frail frame, there was still that young boy trying to give utterance to a rich internal life that expressed itself in some of the finest Australian poems written. In the poem The Cave in the Sky Rowbotham wrote in a richly metaphoric way about dying: "If memory lives, then memory cares." And so he will be remembered.

 Poet David Rowbotham's late flowering crowned a life's work

• by: Phil Brown
• From: The Australian
• October 08, 2010   

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/poets-late-flowering-crowned-a-lifes-work/story-e6frg8n6-1225935637230 

The Gardener

I watched my father digging in his garden.

His spade, with a sound like the palm of a huge hand 

Against a huger tree, struck through the soil,

Lifted, turned, let fall. He pounded with care

Each stubborn clod and broke it into earth

That flowed between his fingers;

And the peewit came from the nest in the camphor-laurel

And, with a bird's simplicity, like a child's trust,

Stabbed for worms in the shadow of his knees.

You can not know the kindness of a man

Till you see him in a garden with a spade

And birds about his feet.

  

from Bungalow and Hurricane

published 1967 by Angus & Robertson, Sydney. 

'If you choose words carefully they resonate forever.'

Soprano Helen Noonan on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Helen Noonan has performed in the lieder opera Voicing Emily, The Life and Times of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's poetry helped her make sense of her own life and she says she was deeply affected in many dimensions. 

Noonan says, " She uses the same language as Shakespeare and Mozart. If you choose words carefully they resonate forever. That is why the arts are so potentially valuable because they can connect a society to infinity."

Spoken by Emily Dickinson

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

From 'Poet's evocative words brought to life again as soprano performs an encore' by Robin Usher, published in The Age, Melbourne, 16 August 2012.

http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/

Robyn Mathison

My hens give advice on poetry

The world is full of cruelty and beauty:
a full moon rising gold above the river,
star travel through the cold night sky,
frost on grass blade and chook claw,
leaves winking in wing-stretch morning sun.

Take your poems out into the garden,
think and speak them, try to hum them.
Pick some seed heads, dig some mulch in,
nip back a tendril of rampant creeper.
Stop and think your poems through again.

Your poems should strike the heart
with terror and with beauty.
As you settle down to write them
stop and ask yourself: Are they
fox-coloured? Do they sing? 

from the 2009 collection To Be Eaten By Mice
published by Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide
http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/

My hens give advice on poetry posted with permission of the poet: Robyn Mathison

Inquisitive Hens

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigbold/19794236/