The City of Inspiration

Sometimes I feel this
     mystifying town
is built more from the sky
     than from the ground.

For Marianne Moore

The New York Public Library

Ms. Moore, I have read your work from place to
place, hunkering over the pages to savor
the way your nimble feet tip toe across
the page with every step as light as it is sure.
The poems are a guiding line of lanterns
extending through passages of detailed grandeur
where the protean shapes that you portray
are a lively menagerie, not exhibiting
human qualities, but revealing virtues
essentially and effortlessly natural.
And now for the first time in my life
I am reading your poetry in Brooklyn
to find the greatest paradox you ever penned
is your numerous versions of perfection.

Garrett Buhl Robinson

June 9, 2014

Communing with the Ancients

Communing with the Ancients


Through a solitary stretch sketched
upon a parchment surface,

hatched from the brooding memories
of isolations and interactions,

meticulously formulated
into ponderously balanced phrases

carried about clasped to the breast,
surviving rebuke and neglect,

hollered from resounding mountains
and sipped with tender attention

through intimate statements
and broadening relations

while retaining rapturous meaning
through transcriptions and translations,

through the extending lengths of space and time
the reach of poets have touched my life.


Garrett Buhl Robinson
5/8/14

Mirth and Melodious Poetry

Photo by Jeremiah Hull

I have become such a fixture in front of the library a photographer decided to use me in one of his shoots.

The other day I had the pleasure to work with Jeremiah Hull and Lindsey. I can say that the warm, congenial spirit of Lindsey that is captured in the photos is without question a combination of the
sincerity of her brilliant character and the exceptional artistry of the photographer.

Check out Jeremiah's website for some truly beautiful photography. http://www.jeremiahhull.net/

Photo by Jeremiah Hull

Happy National Poetry Month, Time to Fill the Air with Music!

On First Looking into John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice

Reading John Rawls is like watching Spinoza

work.  The propositional statements opening

every paragraph distinctly outline a frame.

Then the ensuing declarations reveal the delicate

curve of the lens.   One would expect a coarseness

in the grind of gritty words, a gnashing of gears

in the machinery of technicalities, but the dust

clears with the soft breath of insightful inspiration

revealing a clarity in vision, not simply of the text,

but of the world. 

                                  I imagine Keats “First Looking,”

climbing steep slopes of verdant folios from within

Baruch’s humble chamber, diligently polishing

the mind into a never-ending understanding

resolving the focus of everyone’s spectacular life. 

Garrett Buhl  Robinson

4/2/14

A Sketch of Breath

New chapbook!  Available in front of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street.  

Everyone a Sun

Everyone a Sun

To understand is to dine divinely,
to devour without consuming.
The digestion is perception,
dissolving into the dissolving,
the more thoroughly infused,
the more completely ingested.

The sustenance is representation,
spiced with varieties of imperfections,
cascading into the metabolism
of the processes of thought.

No animal is stalked and slayed,
no fruit is plucked, no fields reaped,
they propagate through the nothing of poetry
and thrive within the enlivening mind.

Garrett Buhl Robinson
2/5/2014

Everyone is familiar with the use of food and ingestion metaphorically representing our sentient functions or the material for those functions, for example: "Food for Thought." In addition to using the similarities as an illustrative tool, I have amused myself through the years developing a more extensive comparison between the two processes.

Of course the process of thought is performed with a physical system just as process of digestion, and of course the absorption of information through our sensory organs is comparable with the ingestion of organic molecules through our digestive tract, as our assimilation of this information into understanding has many parallels with the ingestion of molecules through our metabolic process. But an interesting consideration is that our thought process is a physical operation that actually represents something outside of ourselves, and in many ways, without disturbing what is outside of ourselves. I read a book, I grasp the information and directly transform my neurological processes to retain that information, but the information remains undisturbed on the page. It is a beautiful event.

Also, on an aside, for those of you who enjoy geometry, when considering the alimentary canal, the physical bodies of animals are actually torus shapes.