February 2012
17 posts
Letters of Note: from Iggy Pop
“i read the whole fucking thing, dear. of course, i’d love to see you in your black dress and your white socks too. but most of all i want to see you take a deep breath and do whatever you must to survive and find something to be that you can love.”
Iggy Pop to a fan.
Marilynne Robinson, from 'Gilead' (2)
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we...
Marilynne Robinson, from 'Gilead'
These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
Vladimir Nabokov
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Zadie Smith, from 'On Beauty'
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
Stephanie Saldana
Your absence is the name of the sea in someone else’s language.
Billy Collins, 'Vade Mecum'
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
Virginia Woolf, from 'Mrs. Dalloway'
And the supreme mystery … was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Florence Foster Jenkins
Florence Foster Jenkins pursued her lifelong dream to sing and became famous for her “complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability” (Wikipedia). Incredibly popular for the amusement she provided her audience, Foster Jenkins dismissed their laughter as “professional jealousy.”
With regard to her critics, she said:
“People may say I can’t...
James Joyce, from 'A Painful Case'
This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own,...
Anne Carson, from 'Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions'
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Vladimir Nabokov, from 'Strong Opinions'
To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
George Orwell, from '1984'
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have...
Stephen Dunn, from 'Ars Poetica'
Maybe from the beginning
the issue was how to live
in a world so extravagant
it had a sky,
in bodies so breakable
we had to pray.
oh hello.
hey everyone, I’m back. I missed you.
March 2011
2 posts
goffish
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
adj. [after E. Goffman] exhausted by politeness, which wraps gifts of honesty with ceremonial bows, fluffy gestures and paper-thin phrases which protect the recipient from figuring out how you really feel about status, intimacy, trust, and their new mustache.
“She thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those...”
– Emma, Jane Austen (via bruisedpoets)
October 2010
1 post
Amiri Baraka, from 'Preface to a Twenty Volume...
And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into
Her own clasped hands
September 2010
7 posts
Emily Dickinson, '91'
It’s such a little thing to weep,
So short a thing to sigh;
And yet by trades the size of these
We men and women die!
Mourid Barghouti
The poet strives to escape from the dominant used language, to a language that speaks itself for the first time.
Mary Oliver, from 'Starfish'
What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun
loving what is easy?
It never grew easy,
but at last I grew peaceful:
all summer
my fear diminished
as they bloomed through the water
like flowers, like flecks
of an uncertain dream,
while I lay on the rocks, reaching
into the darkness, learning
little by little to love
our only world.
1 tag
Does Your Language Shape How You Think? →
Anna Akhmatova
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I...
Anna Akhmatova, 'The Sentence'
And the stone word fell
On my still-living breast.
Never mind, I was ready.
I will manage somehow.
Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless … Summer’s ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I’ve foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.
August 2010
28 posts
Billy Collins, from 'Litany'
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Izumi Shikibu, 'Although the Wind'
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof-planks
of this ruined house.
W. H. Auden, from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats'
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
W. H. Auden, from 'The More Loving One'
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W. H. Auden, 'If I Could Tell You'
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The...
“Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
– Martin Luther King Jr (via believeinfreedom) (via irresistiblerevolution, believeinfreedom) (via palestina) (via thingsimreading)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (2)
Without incessant artistic creation by everyone, there can be no lasting society.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Lilli Manis, from 'i am staring into space'
there’s a girl I knew. her name was Lilli and she would have turned 20 today.
that’s all there is to say, I guess.
And in this twilit midpoint,
where memory is too distant for comfort
and anticipation still too faint
I wrap it like a poem tightly around my shoulders,
wincing at the taste of undeveloped songs
that fill my mouth to overflowing If you see something at the corners...
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.”
– Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (via unburyingthelead) (via fuckyeahreading)
Adrienne Rich, from 'Snapshots of a...
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Cesar Vallejo, 'Black Stone on Top of a White...
I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris— it does not bother me—
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned,
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.
César Vallejo is...
1 tag
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'Number 8'
It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
‘We think differently at night’
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
‘whom I am constantly shocking’
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and...
3 tags
Charles Bukowski, from 'a new war'
and to think, after I’m gone,
there will be more days for others, other days,
other nights.
dogs walking, trees shaking in
the wind.
I won’t be leaving much.
something to read, maybe.
a wild onion in the gutted
road.
Paris in the dark.
I always feel bad when I put up a string of poems by the same author; I discover someone and blaze through what I can find of theirs and can’t help but show you what I like. sorry, guys. I’m reading a book of poetry by Bukowski right now, if you couldn’t tell (“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”), and every fifty pages or so I see something I...
Charles Bukowski, 'this moment'
it’s a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the great loves,
it’s a farce, a farce, a farce,
history and the recording of it,
forget it, forget it.
you must begin all over again.
throw all that out.
all of them out
you are alone with now.
look at your fingernails.
touch your nose.
begin.
the day flings...
2 tags
Charles Bukowski, from 'no title'
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird.
wish us
luck.
Charles Bukowski, 'too soon'
this dutchman
in a Philly bar put
3 raw eggs in his
beer
before he took a drink.
71, he was.
I was 23 and sat 3
barstools away
burning
sorrows.
I held my head in all its
tender precious
agony
and we drank
together.
“feelin’ bad, kid?” he asked.
“yeh. yeh. yeh.”
“kid,” he said, “I’ve slept longer than you’ve...
Charles Bukowski, from 'the people'
all people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.
it is all ash
and dry leaves
and grief gone
like an ocean liner.
Jack Gilbert, from 'A Fact'
He crosses the island in the giant sunlight,
comes back in the dark thinking of the woman.
The fact of her goes on, loved or not.
Jack Gilbert, from 'The Abundant Little'
All things
are taken away. Indeed, indeed.
But we secretly think of our bodies
in the heart’s storm and just after.
And the sound of careless happiness.
We touch finally only a little.
Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly
in the dark. The acute little that is there.
Marge Piercy, from 'Community'
Loving is lonely in a violent world
Marge Piercy, from 'For the Young Who Want To'
The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.