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"
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"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/."
Robert Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barrett. The couple secretly married nineteen months later.
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“If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,
think of the mole digging a...”
– ecstasis
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“You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily....”
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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...
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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...
2 tags
“But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will...”
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“The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like...”
“I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets...”
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being...”
– (via proustitute)
“A stone thrown into a silent lake
is—the sound of your name.
The light click...”
– (via proustitute)
“I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me...”
– (via awritersruminations)
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“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”
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“I chose to stay present,
to unlearn how to unlove,
to love,
and to practice...”
– (via loverofstories)
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“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
2 tags
“A question in a poem doesn’t demand an answer, it’s
itself, like that accurate...”
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“do you remember the Halloween
I went dressed as a cello & you
...”
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“Words, more words. What have I
done?”
-Franz Wright, from...”
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“I have been spared the fate
of those who love words
more than what they...”
– (via mixmasterjeff)
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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
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"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"
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“I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like...”
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“you dream in the language of dodging bullets and artillery fire.
new, sexy...”
– (via grammatolatry; rosiee)
“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...
2 tags
“If we are silent for long enough,
we could start over.”
-Cyril Wong,...”
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“Lay yourself down on the restaurant floor
And recite all that’s been kept...”
2 tags
“Whatever we say
we know there is another
language under this one”
-W....”
– (via proustitute)
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“It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a...”
– (via proustitute)
1 tag
“I will give myself back
By giving me away”
-Alice Notley, from...”
3 tags
Robert Creeley, “The Language”
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...
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“Don’t lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.” -Samuel Beckett in a letter to Robert Pinget, 1956.
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"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"
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“I know my worn woman’s body;
how it would fit to the center of him
how I...”
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...
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...
“Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to
save my life
a...”
– MITFORD
2 tags
“I am lonely for myself
I can’t find a real poem
if it won’t...”
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
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“Don’t try to fool the fist that’s tightening right beneath your...”