The Bel Esprit Project, co. est. 2020
"Either you had Bel Esprit or you did not have it."
- Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
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APRIL 2024
Volume V, Issue V
1A NEWS
THE LATEST
WRITING PROMPT
She paced down the empty aisles of the bookstore in a fury. This anger wouldn't dissipate; the injustice of it brought her hands to her head, her fingers dragging through her hair.
Her arms collapsed back to her sides just as she stumbled over something lying on the waxed wooden floor. She kicked out hard, sending the little red book sliding further down the aisle. She strode after it and kicked it again. Only once she had reached the end of the long aisle did she stoop to pick it up.
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THE EXPERTS
The Experts on Poetry:
"A poet’s work … to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep."
- Salman Rushdie
"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
- W. H. Auden
"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."
- Plato
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
- Robert Frost
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
- William Wordsworth
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
- Oscar Wilde
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
- Allen Ginsberg
“Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”
- Mary Oliver
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
- Emily Dickinson
THE EXPERTS
On the New Year
“For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.”
- T.S. Elliot
“A new heart for a New Year, always!”
- Charles Dickens
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
“New Year’s Eve always terrifies me. Life knows nothing of years. Now the horns have stopped and the firecrackers and the thunder… it’s all over in five minutes… all I hear is the rain on the palm leaves, and I think, I will never understand men, but I have lived it through.”
- Charles Bukowski
“New Year’s Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
- Mark Twain
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something. So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life. Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
- Neil Gaiman
"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
- Oscar Wilde
PHOTOGRAPHY
Untitled
By Lisa Finegan
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