21 March 2025

Dear friends of Rilke, 

How wonderful that you were able to join us for Thursday’s craft talk, “Everything Matters: Exploring the Creative Imagination with Rainer Maria Rilke.” I’ve been grateful to hear from quite a number of you following the event, reflecting on what they gathered from our exploration of Rilke’s visionary writings. 

Each of us carries within us the poetic impulse, that deep longing to discover what he called our “innerness” as a way of grounding ourselves in our lives. In her memoir that explores her life with RMR, Lou Andreas Salomé put it this way: “Each one of us leads an imaginative existence, from the most elemental to the most sophisticated levels of our experience, from our waking thoughts to the deepest dreams that come to us in the night. And the more removed we are from our controlling consciousness and the more immersed we become in what arises within us from the soul’s darkness, the more convinced we are of the poet within us, indeed the poet within every person.” 

Below, please find the poems I shared, in my translation and in the order presented. Several are not available in print and I would appreciate it if you would not circulate them at this point as they are part of a larger volume scheduled for publication in several years. The two selections from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus are from my recent (award-winning) bilingual version, published last year by Monkfish Book Publishing and readily available in bookstores and online. I’ll also include the quotations we explored together. You might also be interested in the book I wrote with the Australian bestselling author (and Rilke scholar), Stephanie Dowrick, which was published several months ago: You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke. Also from Monkfish and available wherever books are sold. This one explores life-questions we all face with short pieces Stephanie and I wrote, each of which draws on a poem of Rilke’s. 

Finally, if you’d like to be in touch with me, you can find a link to do so on my website (www.msburrows.com). I’d be glad to include you in occasional mailings about other events I’ll be leading, Rilke retreats/workshops/talks among them, if you wish. Or you can write to me directly at: mark.s.burrows@gmail.com 

In the meantime, my thanks for your interest and participation in my craft talk. 

With best wishes,