Stephen Cramer

"Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings." --W.H. Auden

“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.” ― William S. Burroughs

"The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder." --Rumi. I don't think it's an accident that he left out "soulless, idiotic, incompetent, arrogant racist."

"Resist much, obey little." Yeah, Grandpa Walt!

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." Eff yeah, Thomas Aquinas!

"You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language." —Joseph Brodsky

"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." —Yeah, Anton Chekhov!

"During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for... Keep fighting, keep dancing." --Dan Savage

"This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” --Toni Morrison

Thinking back to when my kiddo was 11 and rereading Animal Farm. Isa came across the sentence "Mollie refused to learn any but the six letters that spelt her own name" and said, "but Dad, Mollie only has five letters." I'm not trying to say that my kiddo is smarter than George Orwell, but...

"Love...is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light... In those moments when life...occlude(s) our own light from our view...there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another." Yeah, James Baldwin!

Interesting. I never considered a scale of accents before. I just consider the word "nature," and I think: well, the first is definitely accented, so that makes two accented syllables in a row, thus a spondee. But nuance is everything! Such fun stuff.

And then this a few lines later: "Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth." I hear a spondee in "stamp wrin..."

Just read this in King Lear: "Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!" To my ear this starts off with a spondee.

Shakespeare Redacted! Hey, gang! The possibility of collaborating with the greatest author of all time was too great an opportunity to pass up! In these blackout poems, I used the first and last pages of each of Shakesp…

Psyched to be holding the new book! stephencramer.wordpress.com/2024/11/25/s...

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." --Anne Lamott

Books Shakespeare RedactedFor Stephen Cramer, the possibility of collaborating with the greatest author of all time was too great an opportunity to pass up. In these blackout poems, Cramer used the first…

Anyone totally into the worlds of A) Shakespeare and B) blackout poems? I know! Who isn't, right? Hello!
If you want to check out a project that combines both of them, give this book, Shakespeare Redacted, a click. :)
stephencramer.wordpress.com/books/

...on an accurate depiction of people's lives as they are actually lived--this is a political act." --Philip Levine

"We now exist in the kind of world Orwell was predicting, and the simple insistence upon accurate language has become a political act. Nothing is more obvious than what our politicians are doing to our language, so that if poets insist on the truth or...

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." --Rumi

I agree they're hard to come by. And it really depends on the delivery, but possibly knick knack? Hum drum?

Every once in a while I'm listening to a song by Bill Evans, and I'm like... huh, how very un-Bill-Evans-like is this? And then, like magic, it turns into perfect Bill Evans. I'm not sure how he does that, but every time he does I'm so happy.

"We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one." --Yeah, Confucius!

"The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more." --Erica Jong

I like your description of how the harsh sounds of the consonants mirror the mindset of the speaker!

"There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule." --Mark Twain

Checking out the new digs. Any poetry folk who want to connect out there?