May 2012
37 posts
1 tag
“Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough.”...”
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“I walked home,
Chanted the first lines of this poem,
And committed them to...”
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When I woke up on the batture & you were not only gone but had never been there & I heard the aluminum silence of the river I was scared— it wasn’t metaphysical exactly I just thought they were firing cannons over the water to make Huck’s carcass rise -Everette Maddox, “Composed On the Back Of A Dark Green Muddy Waters Poster”
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and...”
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After a certain age, there’s no one left to turn to. You’ve got to find Eurydice on your own, you’ve got to find the small crack between here and everywhere else all by yourself. How could it be otherwise? Everyone’s gone away, the houses are all empty, and overcast starts to fill the sky like soiled insulation. -Charles Wright, “No Direction Home”
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On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love. And in the evening the sun is just rising. Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure. In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy … -Russell Edson,...
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“Prof. W. explained to me that there are weightless things. Gravitation for one....”
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from “Blue Yodel of the Desperado”
I went to New York to leave you Flowers of blood and light In the Picture Shows I dreamed Of your birthmark in the shape of a pistol
There you were alone and asleep In your bed like a lake And your Father watched over you And his land
As always you slept naked With the windows wide open
The down on the small of your back Was like dust on the guitar Holding up...
night writing text reads: this doesn’t compare to the feel of your skin
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from Death, Is All
Who wants to believe death’s just another life inside a box…
I don’t want that to be it. Or some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes
I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train I see a house in the morning sun and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry and I think “Crisp inquiry” & go on to work, perfumed of it — that’s the...
“Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a...”
– VALUSKA
“Once more, it turned out that
the real world doesn’t exist, to the immense...”
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“I tack photographs onto trees and walls,
and pray
for those who had simple...”
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“My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the...”
–
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“the greatest things-let’s have an understanding- are not confusing sensuality with passion, of love with fulfilment, of heaven with possibility; the greatest things are about belonging to what you have no command over- sunsets, tears, and the face that is dearest; love is about being killed when you lack the inclination-“ -Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, from “The...
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From this distance he can see that the man is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself. Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert. Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better than success in the same way that this poem is still getting at something as it descends into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once. We die and are put into the earth forever is a line directly...
“To die a good death means to live one’s life. I don’t say a good...”
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“I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not...”
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There are no starfish in the sky tonight, But there is one below your belly, And there are cold evenings in your eyes. If I could get to your house I would look under the bed of your childhood, The tongueless loafer without laces or eyes, The cave of your young foot With its odor of moon, its dampness Coming from underground, your shoe Which also bled and is now an island. You have to remember...
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“To be lost is only a failure of memory.”
-Margaret Atwood, from “A Boat”
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“I would rather cut myself loose
from time, shave off my hair
and stand at a...”
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Certain portions of the heart die, and are dead. They are dead. Cannot be exorcised or brought to life. Do not disturb yourself to become whole. They are dead, go down in the dark and sit with them once in a while. -Gilbert Sorrentino, “Anatomy”
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“All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could...”
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“But what or where to recover
what is not love
too simply.
I saw her
and...”
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I could look at an empty hole for hours thinking it will get something in it, will collect things. There is an infinite emptiness placed there. -Robert Creeley, “Joy”
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“8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning....”
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“Oh when regrets stop
and the silence comes
back to be
a place still for us,...”
– (via the-final-sentence)
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Notes from Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry interview from the Paris Review:
-History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else.
-human freedom is conditional. In English, when you are let out of jail you’re “on parole,” and parole means “speech,” “word,” “word of honor.” But the condition under which you are free is language, human awareness.
-There are two situations for...
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“believe me
I loved you
before roads
alive and in the air
I dreamed I dreamed...”
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“In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V’s of birds flying in...”
– (via proustitute)
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“Obliterate a bit more until I’m among bloodstones in a field in Wyoming.
There...”
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“for love
Frank spoke softly
into envelopes
instead of
writing...”
– thank you VALUSKA <3
April 2012
59 posts
1 tag
“I look and look, as though I could be saved simply by looking.”
-Anthony...”
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“Lewis’ mother says we’re snobs, we think only about poetry”...”
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“And language the false start to love it is, how unknown it is, Leaping and...”
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“The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.”
-Brenda...”
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“I gaze at my corpse and my corpse is a wire. I am its acrobat, its hostage. It...”
“I don’t want to turn any of this into poetry
but
you’re so beautiful
flowers...”
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“What is it you’re unable to surrender and please
may I have that, is how every...”
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Those goddamn lonely moments when I address him in the orchard of his blue eyes, I ask him to tell me one unwholesome thing, and he deflects. I remember being the only one watching moon color clinging to the shoreline (white hairs flat against my legs). Somehow I knew what to notice about the heat of summer crouching in corners, and there I found a good and satisfying fear. His rugged...
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i woke without you and the igloo seeming colder. i could peek out the crawl-hole but if the entire spinning earth’s imaginary i don’t want to know. i have my pelts and visions of you asleep in your summer skin loving the deep heart of a tall grass prairie. i have polar bears and snow blindness. you have sunsets striking the silent crows iridescent. when they swoon to their...
3 tags
“And now
I want to be left
without words. To know how to lose
what is being...”
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“To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love.”...”
– (via the-final-sentence)
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“How can I celebrate love now that I know what it does?” -Gregory Orr
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When we say I miss you what we mean is I’m filled with dread. At night alone going to bed is like lying down in a wave. Total absence of light. Swept away to gone. -Hayden Carruth, “Swept”