life between the pages

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Poetry Monday: The Author to Her Book


Source: Clements Library Chronicles

Anne Bradstreet

        THOU ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain
Till snatched from thence by friends less wise than true
Who thee abroad exposed to public view,
Made thee, in rags, halting, to the press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened, all may judge,
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat—in print—should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But naught save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst vulgars mayst thou roam,
In critics’ hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she, alas, is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.


Source:
Colonial Prose and Poetry
Edited by William P. Trent and Benjamin W. Wells
The 57 writers in these three volumes spanning more than a century and a half represent the literary and cultural trends in Colonial North America—from the confrontation with the American Indians to Puritan life to opposition to slavery. 
NEW YORK: THOMAS Y. CROWELL & Co., 1901 
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2010

In the earlier period men lived earnestly if not largely, they thought highly if not broadly, they felt nobly if not always with magnanimity.—Preface  Trent and Wells