February 2012
60 posts
1 tag
"True enough I cried | such abuses are narratives All the moon is atrocity and all the love is sun The space of love blows me up and resuscitates the boredom | You bitch of a busted quill | I am aching of the sea" - Michael Kindellan, from "The Battered Vessel"
Feb 28th
9 notes
1 tag
"Whatever girl dares to read just one page is a lost girl, but she can't     blame it on this book--she was already ruined." -Lisa Robertson, from "Utopia/."
Feb 28th
16 notes
Robert Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barrett. The couple secretly married nineteen months later.
Feb 24th
8 notes
1 tag
“If you think loneliness is beyond calculation, think of the mole digging a...”
– ecstasis
Feb 24th
38 notes
1 tag
“You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily....”
Feb 24th
48 notes
Feb 24th
10 notes
Feb 24th
7 notes
1 tag
There’s an art to everything. How the rain means April and an ongoing-ness like that of song until at last it ends. A centuries-old set of silver handbells that once an altar boy swung, processing … You’re the same wilderness you’ve always been, slashing through briars, the bracken of your invasive self. So he said, in a dream. But the rest of it—all the rest— was waking: more...
Feb 24th
25 notes
1 tag
I’ve always wanted to begin a poem with the line, “I’ve always wanted to begin.” Now I have. Best to end here, but then the universe is expanding back into its black beginnings, and space, aware of its own looming demise, is singing of possibilities. I’m almost over, it sings, it’s almost over and sooner or later we’d be left with nothing but time. If we...
Feb 24th
349 notes
Feb 24th
4,268 notes
2 tags
“But, you will say, we loved And some parts of us loved And the rest of us will...”
Feb 24th
75 notes
1 tag
“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like...”
Feb 24th
25 notes
Feb 24th
285 notes
“I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets...”
Feb 24th
234 notes
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being...”
–  (via proustitute)
Feb 24th
129 notes
“A stone thrown into a silent lake is—the sound of your name. The light click...”
– (via proustitute)
Feb 24th
270 notes
“I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me...”
– (via awritersruminations)
Feb 24th
208 notes
1 tag
“As a blind man, lifting a curtain, knows it is morning, I know this change: On one side of silence there is no smile; But when I breathe with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep” -Theodore Roethke, from “Journey To The Interior”
Feb 23rd
16 notes
1 tag
“I chose to stay present, to unlearn how to unlove, to love, and to practice...”
–  (via loverofstories)
Feb 23rd
123 notes
Feb 23rd
30 notes
1 tag
“When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Feb 23rd
72 notes
2 tags
“A question in a poem doesn’t demand an answer, it’s itself, like that accurate...”
Feb 18th
14 notes
1 tag
“do you remember the Halloween I went dressed as a cello & you ...”
Feb 18th
86 notes
1 tag
“Words, more words. What have I done?” -Franz Wright, from...”
Feb 17th
22 notes
1 tag
“I have been spared the fate of those who love words more than what they...”
– (via mixmasterjeff)
Feb 17th
29 notes
1 tag
The Mother of the Commander Michitsuna  (10th century) Have you any idea How long a night can last, spent Lying alone and sobbing? -Translation by Kenneth Rexroth
Feb 17th
18 notes
1 tag
"But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold; And the question of whether we get what we ask for Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told. I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there." -Weldon Kees, from "Early Winter"
Feb 17th
32 notes
1 tag
“I don’t want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like...”
Feb 17th
42 notes
1 tag
“you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire. new, sexy...”
– (via grammatolatry; rosiee)
Feb 16th
93 notes
“Credo” by by Andrew Zawacki You say wind is only wind & carries nothing nervous in its teeth.     I do not believe it. I have seen leaves desist                    from moving although the branches                    move, & I believe a cyclone has secrets the weather is ignorant of.                     I believe in the violence of not knowing. I’ve seen a river lose...
Feb 16th
40 notes
2 tags
“If we are silent for long enough, we could start over.” -Cyril Wong,...”
Feb 16th
36 notes
1 tag
“Lay yourself down on the restaurant floor And recite all that’s been kept...”
Feb 16th
32 notes
2 tags
“Whatever we say we know there is another language under this one” -W....”
– (via proustitute)
Feb 16th
476 notes
1 tag
“It’s dark. You exhale a fist of memory. I love you like weathering wood in a...”
– (via proustitute)
Feb 16th
1,262 notes
1 tag
“I will give myself back By giving me away” -Alice Notley, from...”
Feb 10th
46 notes
3 tags
ListenRobert Creeley, “The Language”
Feb 10th
22 notes
1 tag
Henri Michaux: V I am writing to you from the end of the world. You must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collect the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. But what for? There’s nothing between them and the tree any more, and we go off troubled. Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always? There are subterranean...
Feb 10th
22 notes
1 tag
Feb 9th
46 notes
2 tags
“Don’t lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.” -Samuel Beckett in a letter to Robert Pinget, 1956.
Feb 9th
106 notes
1 tag
Feb 9th
24 notes
2 tags
"I want to be dead but not as our technological life is dead I want to be dead in a thoughtless presence, a topaz presence like an animal's eye." -Alice Notley, from "47th Birthday"
Feb 9th
18 notes
1 tag
Feb 9th
88 notes
1 tag
“I know my worn woman’s body; how it would fit to the center of him how I...”
Feb 9th
36 notes
3 tags
"II--The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced" by Alice Notley In grief the person that you were is replaced by grief . . . not the person you originally were but the one you'd become. Grief is opportunistic and uncontrollable    it doesn't exactly come from you, you "allow it in"   It's godlike    as in possession. This was the night I was the craziest: near my birthday, four months after...
Feb 9th
17 notes
1 tag
If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over, for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?” I can dance in my sleep and...
Feb 9th
28 notes
Feb 9th
287 notes
“Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a...”
– MITFORD  
Feb 9th
541 notes
2 tags
“I am lonely for myself I can’t find a real poem if it won’t...”
Feb 9th
34 notes
1 tag
“In winter I think spring will be my salvation, and in summer I think autumn, and in autumn winter, it is always the same, I hope from one season to the next.” -Thomas Bernhard, from Old Masters: A Comedy
Feb 7th
31 notes
1 tag
“Don’t try to fool the fist that’s tightening right beneath your...”
Feb 7th
217 notes