March 2012
171 posts
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“Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.”
- D....”
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“Like translations, poems
Say the unsayable twice,...”
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“i don’t remember who
i was before we met
and now that you’re
gone where am i?...”
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SELF PORTRAIT AT TWENTY YEARS I set off, I took up the march and never knew where it might take me. I went full of fear, my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing: I think it was the icy wind of the dead. I don’t know. I set off, I thought it was a shame to leave so soon, but at the same time I heard that mysterious and convincing call. You either listen or you don’t, and I...
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“I should be happy, that am happy
Never at all since I came here.
I am too long...”
“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I...”
– (via awritersruminations)
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“And I come to this,
knowing the waste, leaving
the rest up to love
and its...”
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F. Scott Fitzgerald recites John Masefield’s...
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“You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got...”
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Charles Bernstein’s poem “Recalculating” features passages on poetry, the tragic suicide of Bernstein’s daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, and the poet’s own mourning process. Here are some of my favorite passages: -Every poem is a model of a possible world that only comes into being when reading is active, activated. -The poem is a constant transformation of itself. -We didn’t...
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“No heart in this world so cold it would not burst into flame
imagining...”
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“Years add up to something, but they do not add up to the world, they do not add...”
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“Strange—
I used to hate sitting in my apartment,
night after night,...”
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“What I needed was to see your breath
Make a signal in the air,
Something old...”
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“There was a time when I wouldn’t have allowed any sense of inner ending to get lost. I would have stayed in that night, my hands in that night, my words. Now, come and end, I give up.” -Jacques Roubaud, from “Endings”
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“Say this life and let it be enough, for once.”
-Joe Bolton, from “Song to...”
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The thing most feared in secret always happens. I write: Oh Thou, have mercy. And Then? All it takes is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride. All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won’t...
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“to go without comes naturally to me now, it costs me almost nothing anymore. I have let them go for so long, and so profoundly, that if you asked me about it I couldn’t say exactly what they were and if I really wanted them. Their place inside my head is empty. Even the sense of missing them has left no trace.” -From “Face” by Umberto Fiori. Translation by...
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“There comes a moment when you do really live here and look these houses in the face, and learn to stand – to be – in the world, to speak to a blank wall. You learn the language, you listen to people passing. You begin to see this place, to feel in the clarity of their words the light of this wall.”
-From “The Wall” by Umberto Fiori. Translation by Alistair Elliot.
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When on a beloved face you catch a glimpse of the sign of too many seasons and a vein, much too dark, stretches out into the room, when the cuts of life well up, a host of them, and the blood slows inside the wrists that we’ve held tight until dawn, it’s not only there that the swelling current stops, then it is night, it is night on every face we have loved.
-Milo De Angelis (Translation by...
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The voice does not connect, does not reach all the way between us like a phon in water instead it stops like a circuit breaker flipped on or off at random. The two of us are a country under embargo, living on parentheses and silences, on blackouts, so that when the lights finally come on again, we have already forgotten what to say to each other.
-Elisa Biagini
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“All night I hear
so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted
to look back, to...”
“There are silences harder to take back than words.”
– James Richardson (via chantellowitz182)
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“There is no place to go that is not you, she said.”
-Kelcy Wilburn, “The...”
– (via trainwrite)
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“Sing me lullabies at dawn when I’ve been up all night painting the wind to...”
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“Truth is
we all lie to find out who loves us”
-Mimi White, from “A...”
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And then we cowards who loved the whispering evening, the houses, the paths by the river, the dirty red lights of those places, the sweet soundless sorrow— we reached our hands out toward the living chain in silence, but our heart startled us with blood, and no more sweetness then, no more losing ourselves on the path by the river— no longer slaves, we knew we were alone and alive. ...
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After Ken Burns By Laura Kasischke The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it. This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river, which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling of the elderly. Not only the scales, beaks, and teeth...
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“May nothing be disturbed
in the simplest place you know
for it is here in the...”
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“There is no choice among the voices
Of love. Even a carp sings.”
-Ruth...”
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from DECOHERENCE, Nate Pritts
Despite any beauty of the composed scene
the two of us standing together in the aura of each other’s particles on an actual pier with the calm occurrence of water in proximity
something is not / exact enough for the elements to provide salvation.
You cannot fight against the truth of what has...
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“The light makes you seem strong enough to scrape off the darkness
as though we...”
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Antonella Anedda:
“This is my understanding of writing: to write in order to disappear, so that life is revealed to me, without me, my face at last more blurred than the whiteness of the paper, bereft of reflection. A world where one can forget oneself. Not a mirror, but a stone.”
“Reality is not an enduring thing, it needs our protection. Buildings collapse, entire worlds disappear. Language...
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VI, Antonella Anedda
This language has no innocence – listen to how speeches break up as if also here there were a war a different war but war all the same – in a time of drought. And so I write with reluctance with a few dry stumps of phrases boxed into humdrum language which I arrange so as to call out down there as far as the dark that sounds the bells *** There’s a window in the night ...
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S
To those who asked him the difference between being sad and being heart-broken, Nachman answered that being heart-broken was not an obstacle to joy.
(Nachman of Breslaw) Is the letter of silence and serpents, of sage serenity, of the soft sounds with which one asks people to be silent. The lips pout, the tongue remains a prisoner of the ring of teeth. Nocturnal silence. When you get up in...
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Nocturnes
October, Night Accept this silence: the word caught in the dark of the throat like a stiffened animal, like the stuffed boar that sparkled in the cellar during October storms. Livid and woven with straw, the dry heart, smokeless, yet against the flash of lightning that nailed the door, each time in the same exact point where death had begun: the futile backstepping, body aflame, the...
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“The only answer I can think of is I know I didn’t have to learn to love you” -Bernadette Mayer
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“a word caught in your throat
is still a word”
-Jerome Rothenberg, from...”
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“I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the...”
– (via beautyisanillusion)
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The poor are many and so— impossible to forget. No doubt, as day breaks, they see the buildings where they wish they could live with their children. They can steady the coffin of a constellation on their shoulders. They can wreck the air like furious birds, blocking out the sun. But not knowing these gifts, they enter and exit through mirrors of blood, walking and dying slowly. ...
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“I’ve wounded myself with love- I’ve snapped bones, they leak marrow, I’m flat...”
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The Silk Road Epistles I stood by the road and smelled your skin on merchants and missionaries entering the city. You sent letters written in a celestial alphabet that confessed, Dear savage kisser, my heart is always. One day you arrived offering cocoons and mulberry leaves, and we sighed together in our mutual loneliness. I discovered your body split by a meridian of burning nerves,...
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Some parts I liked from the Roberto Montes poem The Poet Speaks Of Beauty: -“Things are beautiful when you feel compelled to throw yourself in a fire for them. More so when you have to start the fire yourself.” -“Sometimes this sadness is capable of great acts of beauty” -“Muscle memory is beautiful because it proves your hand know more than you.” ...
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Sir— I have kept my secrets. And been stuffed with them, as on the county's goose day. I tell no one how at night you came to me and slipped your hand between my ribs, how then I knew no heart was left beating in my chest. And after, how another boy touched me and all at once my skin had edges. I was that docile once. I loved you only with my girl-heart, the false one that like a baby tooth...
