Showing posts with label Coleman Barks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coleman Barks. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

become love









~ Coleman Barks
on Rumi



Monday, November 4, 2019

walking within the weather of love











~ Coleman Barks
 on Rumi
 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

opening the heart through ecstatic poetry







~ Rumi
with Coleman Barks and David Darling


Saturday, March 23, 2013

the lips of insanity










~ Coleman Barks
~ Rumi




Tuesday, February 19, 2013

opening








~ Coleman Barks and Robert Bly
with Bill Moyers
on Rumi


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

soul of the world






Rumi 
version and reading by Coleman Barks 



Sunday, March 18, 2012

coleman barks - one through love









~ Rumi
with Coleman Barks



Wednesday, February 1, 2012

blessing bow






Here at seventy-four, I am having an idea
what I do pretty-well, what not-so-well.
I dream. I keep a journal of my dreams,
and I put images from them in trance-poems.
I do not write or think about poetry
with a very clear intelligence. I love
certain lines and passages without getting
the whole picture, like rocks thrown against
my door without knowing who’s there.
I found this piece of paper on my bookshelf
dated Sept. 2, 1976. It records a three-part
dream from that night. I recall best
what it felt like there at the end, here
thirty-five years later. I am invited to
a dinner table with Gary Snyder, his family
and friends. We sit in the blessing-bow.
He begins, but I raise my head instead,
and open my eyes, feeling a great love
coming. The air is electrical, full of spirit.
He opens his eyes and sees me reaching
my hand toward him. He takes my hand,
still saying the blessing, which is about
filling with love for the ONE, as we are,
and amen to that. Now the dream
feels like an approach into this flawed
and difficult, hilarious, opening-out time
left before death encloses me in its whatever
it-will-be, a full prostration blessing-bow.










~ Coleman Barks
from the Georgia Review
photo by Robert Foah


Friday, July 22, 2011

poetry of gratefulness




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Monday, April 4, 2011

follow the perfume, not the tracks

Thursday, March 10, 2011

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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

a message from Coleman Barks





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A message from Coleman Barks:

Trying to explain my silence, and my inability, maybe, to say poems in public for an indeterminate while. Please forgive this group emailing. Last Sunday morning (Feb. 27, 2011) I had a stroke. I was talking on the truck Onstar phone to my love Lisa Starr. I began to slur words, and then became completely inarticulate, then fairly coherent, then not, then back to some clarity. Driving down Milledge, I turned left on Springdale and drove myself to the St. Mary's Emergency room (a Gold Plus Stroke Center). They immediately put me on TPA. So I have been tremendously lucky, actually. In three months, my neurologist doctor (Van Morris!) says (by early June), we will see 80% of what improvement (in my half-smile and my speech) is possible. I plan to work with speech therapists, hypnotists, and whoever else, to get better. Larry Dossey and Fran Quinn say prayer is also a big help.Grace and practice. So there is my challenge for the short run. I am mostly sleeping as much as I can (grace) and listening to recordings of my old voice in my kitchen and talking along (practice). I am not answering the phone or the door, or emails (only a few). Please forgive me these reclusive measures. Think of me as an old dormant bear, healing. Lisa is here. Benjamin and Cole and Briny are close by always. Plenty of helpers. I should also tell you too that my cognition is working. I can read and write just fine, and no motor functions are impaired. Arms and legs active and strong. It is really just a slightly droopy right eyelid and my having only half a smile. Speech is, to me, the big problem. It radically comes and goes with its effectiveness. Hopefully, the brain will re-route itself back to normal.Love to all, Coleman

(Please forward this to anyone who might be interested.)


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