It’s the Extras that Count

National Poetry Month. 12

“The world is what you see outside your window plus what you think of it.”
— William Stafford, from Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford,ed. Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant

The view from my living room window

Camellias through my window

“. . . a poem, or other work of art, is fact and observation plus the man. . . . Our best growth is attained when we match knowledge with love, insight with reverence, understanding with sympathy and enjoyment; else the machine become more and more, and the man less and less.”
— John Burroughs, “Literature and Science,” from Under the Apple-Trees, 1916