Integrity and Memory and Praise

For a co-worker moving on to other work... if I were to laud her, I would point to her integrity and her love of poetry and I would quote from Robin Blaser's essay "Particles" collected in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser

And it is in the specific and the particular that integrity resides. What happens to emotion when it is not tied to the particular is that it becomes as large as Society and as dangerous as "the will of the people," which according to modern history is not recognizable except by one man at the top. And it is in this realm of integrity that poetry has its political base. It is in the concrete nature of poetic speech that integrity remains and endures as a permanence in human affairs.

And then I would quote a few lines from one of her favourite poets.

a good memory cures
the scar a loss leaves

from Zbigniew Herbert "Chord" as translated by Alissa Valles and found in The Collected Poems 1956-1998.

And so for day 647
20.09.2008