When you see me sitting quietly, Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.  I’m listening to myself . . .
When my bones are stiff and aching, And my feet won’t climb the stair,
I will only ask one favor:  Don’t bring me no rocking chair.
When you see me walking, stumbling, Don’t study and get it wrong.
‘Cause tired don’t mean lazy  And every goodbye ain’t gone.
I’m the same person I was back then,  A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs and much less wind.  But ain’t I lucky I can still breathe in.      

Maya Angelou (born April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Johnson)   

Holger Henrik Herholdt Drachmann (9 October 1846–14 January 1908) was a Danish poet, dramatist and painter.  He was a member of the Skagen artistic colony and became a figure of the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough Movement.  Owing to the early death of his mother, he was left much to his own devices and developed a fondness for semi-poetical performances, organising his companions in heroic games, in which he himself took such roles as those of Royal Danish Naval heroes Peder Tordenskjold and Niels Juel.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Drachmann   

The Flatiron Building, originally the Fuller Building, is a 22-story, 285-foot-tall (86.9 m) steel-framed triangular building at 175 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City.  Designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg, and sometimes called, in its early days, "Burnham's Folly", it was opened in 1902.  The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street—where the building's 87-foot (27 m) back end is located—with East 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak.  The name "Flatiron" derives from its triangular shape, which recalls that of a cast-iron clothes iron.  The Flatiron Building was developed as the headquarters of construction firm Fuller Company, which acquired the site from the Newhouse family in May 1901.  Construction proceeded rapidly, and the building opened on October 1, 1902.  Originally 20 floors, a "cowcatcher" retail space (a low attached building so called for its resemblance to the device on rail locomotives) and penthouse were added shortly after the building's opening.  The Fuller Company sold the building in 1925 to an investment syndicate.  The Equitable Life Assurance Society took over the building after a foreclosure auction in 1933 and sold it to another syndicate in 1945.  Helmsley-Spear managed the building for much of the late 20th century, renovating it several times.  The Newmark Group started managing the building in 1997.  Ownership was divided among several companies, which started renovating the building again in 2019.  Jacob Garlick agreed to acquire the Flatiron Building at an auction in early 2023, but failed to pay the required deposit, and three of the four existing ownership groups took over the building.  In October 2023, the building's owners announced that it would be converted to residential condominiums; the project is planned to be complete by 2026.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatiron_Building 

Abraham Cowley (born 1618, London—died 1667, Chertsey, Eng.) was a poet and essayist who wrote poetry of a fanciful, decorous nature.  He also adapted the Pindaric ode to English verse.  https://www.britannica.com/art/Metaphysical-poets 

Cowley quote:  Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.    

Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.  It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct meaning of its own.  Concrete poetry relates more to the visual than to the verbal arts although there is a considerable overlap in the kind of product to which it refers.  Historically, however, concrete poetry has developed from a long tradition of shaped or patterned poems in which the words are arranged in such a way as to depict their subject.  Though the term 'concrete poetry' is modern, the idea of using letter arrangements to enhance the meaning of a poem is old.  Such shaped poetry was popular in Greek Alexandria during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, although only the handful which were collected together in the Greek Anthology now survive.  Examples include poems by Simmias of Rhodes in the shape of an egg, wings and a hatchet, as well as Theocritus' pan-pipes.  The post-Classical revival of shaped poetry seems to begin with the Gerechtigkeitsspirale (spiral of justice), a relief carving of a poem at the pilgrimage church of St. Valentin, Kiedrich.  The text is carved in the form of a spiral on the front of one of the church pews and created in 1510 by master carpenter Erhart Falckener.  But the heyday of the revival of shaped poetry came in the Baroque period when poets, in the words of Jeremy Adler, "did away with the more-or-less arbitrary appearance of the text, turned the incidental fact of writing into an essential facet of composition, and thereby . . . created a union of poetry with the visual arts".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry    

Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault; 1844-1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers.  Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters.  He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".  France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_France#   Anatole France quote:  “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”    

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