January 2012
8 posts
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awritersruminations:
She pressed her lips to mind. — A typo
How many years I must have yearned for someone’s lips against mind. Pheromones, newly born, were floating between us. There was hardly any air.
She kissed me again, reaching that place that sends messages to toes and fingertips, then all the way to something like home. Some music was playing on its own.
...
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How to Fall in Love
tarts:
Start by leaving home. It’s not where the heart is,
but where the hard edge is. When ice begins to ebb from shoreline, freeing mangy marsh grass, leave.
And as you pick up speed, let your life arc out away from you.
Realize that you don’t know where you’re going and that the weather changes often. Steer between the stars like songbirds coming back at night. Listen to the whirring of a...
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Sorry
twicedailypoetry:
I can’t remember the 2nd time I hurt you— it was dark & someplace in that darkness was the thing I did. You weren’t the target, I know that, though you might’ve been the bow & the tension I really think is love. Nothing ever sends me away. I’ve got your pain in my pocket & it glows in the dark and in the light it’s the softest kind of singing woman’s voice....
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“I have reservoirs of want enough
to freeze many nights over.”
– Conor O’Callaghan, from “January Drought” (adapted from rabbit-light)
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December 2011
17 posts
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Jim Fahey by Eileen Myles
I’m deep into The Importance of Being Iceland, a collection of travel essays in art, all by EM herself. I got it in September, but I only started reading it in early October. I have dog-eared a lot of pages, and tumbl’d a lot of quotes. This book is resonating with me, in significant ways, and often. Here are excerpts that really hit me, from an essay she wrote about going to therapy....
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“We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write.”
– Andrea Barrett (via theparisreview & linguisticinterfaces)
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“She plummets through all her languages: journalese, scholarese, tough girl...”
– Eileen Myles on Tory Dent (1996)
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“That initial response, the poet’s notes, are an independent work of art,...”
– About Martha Diamond by Eileen Myles
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Excerpt from "Jerking Off" by Fiona Chamness
I cry watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer a surprising amount. Sometimes it’s the way she builds a family out of people just aware enough of their own screwed-up brains to love her the way she slowly realizes she deserves. Sometimes it’s the constant battering ram of loss and monsters and loss and monsters and loss. I like the way the term insists upon a jerk. Sometimes it’s just relief, spilling...
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First Time/Four Times by Danez Smith
1.
we planned to lose our virginities that afternoon. Rashell said she got off on it how a boy’s body rattles more than pumps that first time he hula hoops in a woman’s valley.
we suckled her, all teeth and unclipped nail calves gone mad for mother’s milk she laughed. why did no god stop this?
we tired of the breast 2 or 3 sampled her platter of discount flesh James handed me a condom. all my...
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“What is being a poet if it’s not a parody? What good is it otherwise? Every poet...”
– from Lisa Robertson’s “The Cabins” in the current issue of The Capilano Review (via poetryeater)
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Sharon Olds, "The One Girl at the Boys' Party"
sharingpoetry:
When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number, they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract her height from ten feet, divide it into hundreds of gallons of water, the...
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Joshua Beckman, "The going. The letters. The...
poetryeater:
The going. The letters. The staying. The life of the little boy. The staying and the life of the little boy. The letter. The mushrooms. Dear Mom, I’m writing to say how good it felt when we took the mushrooms. Our skin. The boy getting on the bus and the street lamp. It’s getting cooler. The life of the little boy. The life of the little boy. The going. The letters. It’s getting...
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November 2011
9 posts
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5. Why did you choose to hide your poems in the...
Interesting, I never really thought of the poems hiding. I believe in confusing the distinctions between what makes poetry and what doesn’t. I feel like poetry is everywhere, you just have to have the lenses on. As far as why I chose prose I think it goes back to my long-running preoccupation with surface level representations and the silent movies that run inside of our heads. I stare at people...
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“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you...”
– John Berryman (via unicornology)
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“All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people...”
– Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (via bookoasis)
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“Feelings seem like made-up things,
though I know they’re not.
I don’t...”
– from Brenda Shaughnessy, “All Possible Pain” in this month’s Paris Review (via poetryeater)
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October 2011
3 posts
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“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their...”
– Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (via freins)
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“Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell
anybody anything” is a string of...”
– Ilse Bendorf, Catch A Body (via colporteur)
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September 2011
8 posts
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Poem in praise of menstruation, Lucille Clifton
kathleenjoy:
if there is a river more beautiful than this bright as the blood red edge of the moon if there is a river more faithful than this returning each month to the same delta if there is a river braver than this coming and coming in a surge of passion, of pain if there is a river more ancient than this daughter of eve mother of cain and of abel if there is in the universe such a river if...
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Steve Gehrke, "Prologue, Epilogue"
sharingpoetry:
for my daughter
when you were vaulted, embargoed, tapping out messages on the walls, when you were translucent, opalescent, a hieroglyph coming to life in its cave, when your body was a glowing aquarium of cells, when you were reptilian, mammalian, quick-changing behind the curtain’s folds, when you were a kite unfolding in the wind, an expanding mesh, an origamist of the...
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“You’re a tooth I tongue and tongue,
tasting blood as you loosen,
testing the...”
– Sandra Beasley, “The Story of My Family” (via awritersruminations)
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“Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.”
– Philip Larkin, Required Writing (via bookoasis)
“I would love to live / Like a river flows / Carried by the surprise / Of its own...”
– John O’Donohue (via stop—breathing)
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Excerpts of "A Triptych (abc)" by Eugenio Dittborn...
a. The Running Omelet
4. The author owes his drawings to the straining of human bodies as they traverse great expanses; he owes his drawings to these bodies in the throes of violent physical exercise: these bodies issuing into photographs and abiding there, fixed, because question marks are fixed.
5. The author owes his drawings to observation of the human face in the course of rigorously...
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Lisa Olstein, "Dear One Absent This Long While"
sharingpoetry:
[…] June efforts quietly. I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall so even if spring continues to disappoint we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.
[…]
(via)
August 2011
17 posts
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“Readers look to writers of creative nonfiction for the same reason they looked...”
– Mark Bowden (via buyhercandy)
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“I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you...”
– Billy Collins, “Vade Mecum” (via bookoasis)
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Michael Ondaatje, "The Time Around Scars"
sharingpoetry:
A girl whom I’ve not spoken to or shared coffee with for several years writes of an old scar. On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white, the size of a leech. I gave it to her brandishing a new Italian penknife. Look, I said turning, and blood spat onto her shirt. My wife has scars like spread raindrops on knees and ankles, she talks of broken greenhouse panes and yet, apart from...
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from Sina Queyras', "Euphoria"
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Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of stone, my age Old, burnished and bruised, my hair lingering, my hand caked, spongy as November my dear Relentless, my dear Aging, your voice tinny, dissonant As Stein shot through decades of war and Fortrel, cocktails on the hour, Zeppelins over Piccadilly, bombing blindly in the fog....
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