Poetry Challenge from Travis Crowder – What are you reading?  Collect
inspiring lines from the story or book and create a Found Poem, crediting
the author of the book.

Words from Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

To Be An Artist

Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write.
Draw near to nature. Depict your sorrows and desires.
Express the images that surround you – your dreams, objects of your memory.
Try to raise the submerged sensations over that distant past of your childhood.
Explore the depths whence your life wells forth.
Seek for the depth of things.
Live for a while in books and learn from them what seems to you worth learning – but above all, love them.
Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves.
It is a matter of living everything.
Love your solitude.
Be glad of your growing into which you can take no one else with you.
Your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.
There is not more beauty in Rome than anywhere else but much beauty in Rome because there is much beauty everywhere.
Go into yourself and meet no one for hours on end.
Be alone as you were in childhood.
Think of the world which you carry within yourself. Pay attention to what arises in you.
Be without resentment.
Be glad and comforted.
To love is good: for love is difficult, and the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.
Be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things.
You must not be frightened when a sorrow rises up before you.
Most people get to know only one corner of their room.
Do not observe yourself too closely.
Do not derive too rapid conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.
Do not think that the man who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled.
Find patience enough in yourself to endure
and single-heartedness enough to believe.
Let life happen to you.
Conduct yourself carefully and consistently.
May the year that lies before you preserve and strengthen you.

-Kim Johnson