A Quote by Graham Hawkes

One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.
..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.
I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.
The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This in certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge.
You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.
Habit must play a larger place in our religious life. We worship when we feel like it, we pray when we feel like it. We read the Bible when we feel like it. Leaving our religious exercises to the promptings of impulse, we become creatures of impulse rather than soldiers of Christ. An army made up of creatures of impulse would be only a mob. So is a church.
Man is unique in creation because he has a sense of justice and truth. We spend billions of dollars each year to set up court systems to see that justice is done, and we build prisons for those who transgress the laws we enact.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.
For me, it is just the total experience - from the time I first started as an assistant coach until I wound up at the University of Texas for 20 years.
It’s not just the adage ‘write what you know,’ it’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.
A poet sees a flower and can go on and on about how beautiful the colors are. But what the poet doesn't see is the xylem and the phloem and the pollen and the thousands of generations of breeding and the billions of years before that. All of that is only available to the scientists.
I wound up getting my degree in sports medicine and nutrition because I wanted to work in the medical field. But I wound up taking a trip to Los Angeles and decided being an actor sounds pretty cool, too.
One of my biggest regrets in coaching was my eighth or ninth game of my career. I was wound up about a conference game in December - I was wound up tight, and we ended up playing really tight. Our players were bickering with the officials, I was bickering... and then all of a sudden we lose.
I wound up auditioning, wound up getting in, and I was off to the races: I was putting in four more years after school to train to be an actor. I was 26 years old, and I still had a locker, for Christ's sake!
A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love awoke, and life awoke.
There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
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