Tulips have sprouted at the base of the plum trees. On my run this morning, bare branches shook and trees creaked from the north wind, but the sun was defiant and the ground mushy and littered from weeks of melted snow. Spring is for flowers, gardens, lovers, and verse.

Books I’m reading: Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Paradox – Physics Enigmas, Americanah & A Spy Among Friends (both reading group selections), Edward Gorey Biography, Amphigorey, Tao Te Ching new translation by Dale

Poetry is sown with words and soul.  So find your gloves and your spade; dust off your poetry anthology and your books; it’s all new again.  Here are Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Dylan Thomas on the gift of reading, on books, on life.

Jorge Luis Borges on Books:

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

There is no Frigate like a Book

By  Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

Lost in the stacks at the Strand, NYC

Where My Books go

By William Butler Yeats

ALL the words that I utter,

And all the words that I write,

Must spread out their wings untiring,

And never rest in their flight,

Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,

And sing to you in the night,

Beyond where the waters are moving,

Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

Notes on the Art of Poetry

by Dylan Thomas

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on

in the world between the covers of books,

such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,

such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,

such and so many blinding bright lights,

splashing all over the pages

in a million bits and pieces

all of which were words, words, words,

and each of which were alive forever

in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.