Bryan Strawser » Poetry

Walden

Bryan Strawser — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:44:06 +0000

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion”

-henry david thoreau

Song of Myself

Bryan Strawser — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:18:13 +0000

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude,
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me…

- Walt Whitman

Meditations in an Emergency

Bryan Strawser — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:01:34 +0000

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me.

I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

- Frank O’Hara

Wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bryan Strawser — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:44:32 +0000

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the utmost and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another…

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson