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”
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“"and I believed then the world
would take me back again,
the earth, the trees,...”
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I’ve caught the unease of old age in my hands and wrung it dry in order to remain within its kaleidoscope, there to collide among all colours of kalos—beauty of eidos—form of skopos—watcher of lovers of irreparables -Robin Blaser
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“Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning...”
– (via awritersruminations)
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“All those flowers that you never grew- that you wanted to grow The ones that...”
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I don’t ask for much: a few words, a rented intimacy. Even without the room, her eyelids waiting to be closed, you can imagine the unmothering, its stark perfection. You’ve occupied these kinds of rooms, done your own borrowing and giving back. I don’t ask for much: a conversation, a form of permanence that I can hold until it’s gone. -Sally Lipton Derringer, “Attachment”
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“I thought of love as a way of taking offense
or filling up a house
we...”
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“We make up a different language for poetry
And for the...”
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“Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies
they are unworded.”...”
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“Something in each of us is waiting
to see if we can survive,
severed.”...”
–
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“I thought that if I were broken enough
I would see the light,
like at the end...”
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“Perhaps vowels were all created In a moment of sorrow before creation- A grief...”
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An Illness Like Any Other, Rachel Vigier
It’s an illness like any other, Van Gogh wrote, as the flashes behind his eyes kept popping while in his hands the brush’s marked determination to continue exploded beyond the canvas, hands and eyes, together, wrestling the mind into some kind of submission. The glory of it assaulted him every time. I have been working on a size 20...
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“And if poetry’s sick, it’s because it’s never enough to lie back in the snow, to...”
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“The clocks of flowers rise, it’s April and yellow and these seconds are an...”
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How do you bury a poet? Surely not how they buried Baudelaire thrown in with his parents like an infant death. It stretches to a ghastly irony Pasternak’s remark that poets should remain children. Do poets really want to trade the lingering savour of experience for guileless eyes? There’s something repulsive about an empty fresh adult face. Such baby faces can be seen in uniform or with a foot on...
5 tags
LXXXV, Catullus (written for his mistress Lesbia)
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and I love. If you ask me why, I have no answer. But I feel it, and I am in agony.
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“What of Hazim Hikmet whose room
for thirteen years was a cell? Who
every...”
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“Trying their wings once more in hopeless flight:
Blind moths against the wires...”
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“where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.”
-Jimmy...”
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“Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,...”
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Octavio Paz: Proem (transl. Eliot Weinberger) At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper...
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“What we need now is distance and local tradition; the breve of italic; the...”
– A Poet Reflects
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“What can I say? Who shall describe the light? It is like an epidemic; it is like...”
– (via sonofapritch)
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Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead. It has my photograph in its soft pocket. It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind. I write poems to unite myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper-right-hand corner of things, to say grace. -Charles Wright, "Reunion"
7 tags
“The poem acts like a salve for the wound of loneliness”
-Matthew...”
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“a silence that almost had a scent”
-Richard Brautigan, from “Lovers”
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“It will be the same
as it has always been
and you are right to pack
your...”
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“The long silences need to be loved, perhaps
more than the words
which arrive...”
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I shake a notebook of empty
pages and say, It’s all in here
Every word of it Dead dogs and stolen
property Embraced
debauchery For 30 years I had
no story to tell Only words
in need of form Every breath
a bomb An infinite
space to fill I see now that death
is just an idea A very real
idea As much an ethos as
an aesthetic Textured
sadness Language...
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“All this is by way of saying that if love is a state for which no language is...”
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“I’m never going to get this right. And I can’t go on forming and...”
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“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.” -Li Po, “The River-Merchant’s Wife” (Translated by Ezra Pound so freely that some consider it to be written by Pound himself.)
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“I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name...”
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“Never mind prayer hands shaped like leaves falling back into the lap because they’re tired of waiting.” -Adrian Matejka, from Mixology
