Logo for California Poets in the Schools Program. Terri Glass coordinates the Marin program California Poets in the Schools and served as their statewide director from 2008 to 2011.
They arrived:
White crowned, Golden-crowned sparrows—
Winter’s mark
December in the park—
river so high, air so chill
my inner thighs freeze
Could barely see them
standing in the cornfield
a hundred sandhill cranes
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Poetry is a lion because it eats and intensifies natural speech.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
“Poetry is from the frontiers of consciousness.”
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
“Words are alive — cut them and they bleed.”
“The Kings who have died one by one are now reborn in poet’s hearts.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
“A poet must achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling
and action, between intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“Poetry is sort of a homecoming.”
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth:
the true poet is near the oracle.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
“Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“I think poetry must stay open all night in beautiful cellars.”
A poet and writer of the natural world, Terri Glass mentored under William Stafford and Robert Bly.