May 2013
17 posts
2 tags
3 tags
“Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
Patti Smith, from Just Kids
3 tags
3 tags
“I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.”
Mary Oliver, from her poem...
3 tags
“I think that night for the first time
I held you with whole hands that night
you said My body will answer yours
that it was like a prayer why
did I laugh then when you had let me see
through the idea of you to you”
Craig Arnold, from “Asunder,” in his collection Made Flesh
3 tags
“The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
...
4 tags
“I would stop
my wings in midair.
If only I could take my place in the dances
where once as a girl at fancy weddings
I made my feet whirl
alongside my girlfriends -
we were rivals in grace”
Euripides, from “Iphigenia Among the Taurians,” translated by Anne Carson
3 tags
“Come, grace of sound and breath,
fortify this mouth,
even when its weakness
frightens and stifles us.
Come, and do not falter,
for we battle so much evil.
Before dragon’s blood protects an enemy,
this hand will fall into the fire.
Deliver me, my word!”
Ingeborg Bachmann, from her poem, “Spoken and Rumored,” translated by Peter Filkins
5 tags
3 tags
“And all the spaces of the midnight town
Ring with appeal and sorrowful abuse.
There some most lonely are: some try to crown
Mad lovers with sad boughs of formal yews,
And Titan women wandering up and down
Lead on the pale fanatics of the muse.”
J. E. Flecker, from “The First Sonnet of Bathrolaire”
3 tags
“The old god, too, writes aureate poetry
In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily...
4 tags
“And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we...
4 tags
“Love forgive me all I’ve given
has been a form of taking
talking over a table of scarred wood
talking always about the table
I’ve held out my hand and drawn it back
in case you took it always afraid
to take the table away forever.”
Craig Arnold, from “A Place of First Permission” in his collection, Made Flesh
I like to imagine that...
3 tags
“And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth”
T. S. Eliot, from part VI of...
4 tags
“Where have they gone, the lordly makers,
Torchlight and fire-folk of our skies,
Those grand authorial earthshakers
Who brought such gladness to the eyes
Of the knowing and unworldly-wise
In damasked language long ago?
Call them and nobody replies.
Et nunc in pulvere dormio.”
Anthony Hecht, from “Death the Poet: A Ballade-Lament For the Makers”
4 tags
“And still the poetry of ancient Sumeria
will be understood with ease -
humiliation,
ambition,
slaughter,
the cutting down of the tallest cedar -
and Beowulf’s verdict yet hold:
Technologies alter.
Heaven swallows the smoke.”
Jane Hirshfield, from her poem, “Haofon Rece Swealg,” in her collection, Come, Thief
One of my favorite lines in Beowulf
4 tags
“Sometimes when girls get together, they vow
to just put their dreams away forever
because boys are creeps, sleazes, troglodytes
and toads. They’re poisoned apples, and spikes
in the heart. Bulldozers with bad breath,
gangplanks to walk off of, horny, grabby,
promise-breaking bastards.”
Ron Koertge, from “The Frog Prince,” in his collection Lies, Knives, and...
4 tags
“Go beyond what’s reliable
in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
these eyes and puddles and stones,
and recollect how bold you were
when I visited you first
with departures you cannot go back on.”
Seamus Heaney, from “Making Strange”
April 2013
30 posts
4 tags
“Such meetings never occur in märchen
Where love-met groundhogs love one in return,
Where straight talk is the the rule, whether warm or hostile,
Which no gruff animal misinterprets.
From what grace am I fallen. Tongues are strange,
Signs say nothing. The falcon who spoke clear
To Canacee cries gibberish to coarsened ears.”
Sylvia Plath, from “Incommunicado.”
From...
3 tags
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes its self; myself is speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I...
4 tags
Chorus: “Will I
throw my bared
throat
back, to the cool
night back, the
way,
oh, in the green joys
of the meadow, the
way
a fawn
frisks, leaps,
throws itself”
Euripides, The Bacchae, as translated by C. K. Williams
It’s in the trees. It’s coming.
3 tags
“”What will happen next?” -
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
no unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.”
Jane Hirshfield, from “When Your Life Looks Back,”...
4 tags
4 tags
“This is not the first time this has happened. There is an endless history of forgotten empires, men gifted by a goddess who bears arrows, things in flight that fall in flames. Always, somewhere, a woman waits alone for news. At night I climb alone to the highest point of the island. There I make a little fire and burn things that I find on the beach and in the woods. Leaves, bark, small...
5 tags
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such...
3 tags
“Soul has its scruples. Things not to be said.
Things for keeping, that can keep the small-hours gaze
Open and steady. Things for the aye of God
And for poetry. Which is, as Milosz says,
‘A dividend from ourselves,’ a tribute paid
By what we have been true to. A thing allowed.”
Seamus Heaney, the fifth part of “On His Work in the English Tongue”
1 tag
theodoragoss:
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
—Mary Oliver
4 tags
“Shantih shantih shantih”
T.S. Eliot. The close of “The Waste Land”
Probably there are a lot of us who have had “April is the cruelest month” rattling around in our heads in recent days. I wanted to remember that the poem closes with an invocation: “Peace peace peace.”
5 tags
“You can’t step into the same story twice - or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less...
4 tags
2 tags
“Don’t be afraid to be weird, don’t be afraid to be different, don’t worry too...”
– Terri Windling, on her blog (via jaimecallahan)
You can also follow Terri Windling on Tumblr
(via ellenkushner)
I needed this reminder. Also, yes. Follow Terri everywhere. She is an actual Fairy Godmother.
3 tags
I’ve posted this before. But it’s comfort, so I am posting it again.
“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
Robert Frost,...
3 tags
“Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter
what species they are?
They leave here, that’s the point,
first their bodies, then their sad cries.
And from that moment, cease to exist for us.
You must learn to think of our passion that way.
Each kiss was real, then
each kiss left the face of the earth.”
Louise Glück, from “Parable of Flight” in her...
4 tags
3 tags
“Fear not fair weather, my lord
as storm’s herald.
For you, a lily
obscene-scented.
For you, a little night lunacy.
I am queen! Everything
I touch turns to sand.”
Rebecca Lindenberg, from “Mad Song” in her collection, Love, An Index
I think a little night lunacy is a fine gift, indeed.
4 tags
“They foresee the expansion of graveyards,
they talk real estate.
Cras, they say,
repeating a rumor
among the whitened branches.
And the wind, a voiceless thorn,
goes over the details,
making a soft promise
to take our breath away.”
Anthony Hecht, from “Crows in Winter”
3 tags
“The only way our narratives will be told is if we write them ourselves. I urge you to write your own selves, your true and complicated selves. My scribbling sisters. We are amateurs. We are dilettantes. We are all those terms they use to dismiss the girl writing. We need, perhaps, to reclaim these terms, as well as the categories of “minor” or “outsider” or...
4 tags
“Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion’s mouth whose hunger
No metaphor can fill?
Well, who in his own back yard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he...
2 tags
”And I am infant here
before your advanced degrees in death, seeking speech
in words of a tongue I am spelling out of you who could,
by the stars and letters of a map you’d make, teach
(Queen Hermes, alphabet giver) anyone to find
the essential simple, and to translate all
locations into constellations of the mind.”
Marie Ponsot, from her poem “Museum Out of...
1 tag
3 tags
“I am inhabited by a cry,
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
It is for such I agitate my heart?”
Sylvia Plath, from “Elm”
I am trying...
2 tags
“And you will no longer be
worrying the stars into meaning, they will
already mean something, but that will only be the wind,
only the wind that will be
keen and keening.
All else will remain hidden and nameless.
By which I mean: your soul.”
Olena Kalytiak Davis, from “Perhaps By Then You Will No Longer Be In Love,” from her collection, And Her Soul Out of...
4 tags
“I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”
Patti Smith, from Just Kids
There are very few books I believe everyone should read. Just Kids is one of those...
4 tags
“The little violets’ heads bowed on their stems,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them
I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside.”
Seamus Heaney, from “His Dawn Vision,” part of his “Mycenae Lookout” poem cycle, in his collection The Spirit Level.
The Spirit Level is the first book of...
3 tags
“They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her -
The mausoleum, the wax house.”
Sylvia Plath, the closing stanzas of “Stings”
...
4 tags
“He sang of the first permission of flesh and flesh to entangle
how we abandon the guard of our heart and throw our borders
open and welcome a sweet invader to take possession
the sudden exquisite catch in a throat and the slow hush
of a breath unfettered the sweetest sounds to a lover’s ear
He sang of hands finding shyly at first their way
to another...
3 tags
Feste: “What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II.iii.43-48.
Feste is my favorite fool.
March 2013
20 posts
3 tags
Hunting the Phoenix
Leaf through discolored manuscripts,
make sure no words
lie thirsting, bleeding,
waiting for rescue. No:
old loves half-
articulated, moments forced
out of the stream of perception
to play ‘statue’,
and never released -
they had no blood to shed.
You must seek
the ashy nest itself
if you hope to find
charred feathers, smouldering flightbones,
and a twist of singing...
4 tags
“That ‘sensual phosphorescence
my youth delighted in’
now lies behind me
like a land of dreams
wherein an angel
of hot sleep
dances like a diva
in strange veils
thru which desire
looks and cries”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from “26” in A Coney Island of the Mind
1 tag
