Mystery Smudges Extra

“

When you use the word ‘flummox,’ for instance, your tongue is rolling across the same territory of every person who has ever spoken that word. It carries every sentiment every person has ever meant when speaking that word, plus your own. They say that every third breath you breathe contains at least one of the same molecules Caesar exhaled as he was dying.

Muriel Rukeyser has said, ‘The world is made of stories, not atoms.’ Think of the words, then, the same words you breathe that have been inhaled and exhaled throughout history. If you’re looking for a link, there it is. They are only shapes and noises formed into meaning. How many shapes and noises have crossed the tongues of those who have come before? And this exact shape and noise has crossed centuries to come to you, fully formed … Words say simultaneously too much and too little. This is why they are perfect for communication, most people’s lives operating in the uncomfortable balance between too much and too little. Nothing more precise.

” B.K. Loren, from “Word Hoard” in Parabola, v.28, no.3, August 2003 (via apoetreflects)

“To decide to do “this” as a living is to invite barbs that generally pile up around gender and power. The poet is a fag, the poet is a drag, the poet is righteous. But really I think people resent our freedom. Our choice to keep doing something they may have done badly when they were younger and were full of feeling and to keep doing something that supposedly anyone can do – making something out of something as practical and mundane as language is to brand oneself as a lifelong fool rather than merely a fool in her youth. People feel sad about what they disavowed to become who they are now. Poets are human of course and have disavowed plenty, but to stand behind this nonetheless significant or foolish act – it’s a kind of self identifying, self categorizing act (like language itself) that enrages people exactly in the place where they’ve made choices and need to assume you haven’t.” Eileen Myles on being a poet (source)

“I have reservoirs of want enough
to freeze many nights over.” Conor O’Callaghan, from “January Drought” (adapted from rabbit-light)

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes — characters even — caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.” Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

(Source: myquotelibrary)

“We write to relieve, elevate, solidify, illuminate, escape. We write so that sometimes we don’t have to live, because living is hard and soul-crushing. We write for the sake of trying to get at a core that might or might not exist. We write to gain love or to express love. We write sometimes for money. We write when we can’t think, when everything else - the suicide jump, the disappearing into an unknown island - fails.”

on writing the first draft of anything (via kindofiguess)

We write for the sake of trying to get at a core that might or might not exist.

“I stumble into and around poetry, frequently knocked sidewise. Sometimes I don’t know what poetry is, and it seems as plentiful as sagebrush on the steppes, and other times it seems that no poem has yet been written, just images and a few joined words flaring in some people’s minds.” Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

“When you were a child, you put your hand on the trunk of a tree and you were comforted, because you knew that the tree was alive—you felt its life when you touched it—and you knew that it was friendly to you, or, at least, not hostile. But of people you were always a little afraid.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.” Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1931 (via proustitute)

“…You are, on the contrary, quite bound up, knitted, restricted. Now and then you break it and you rush on with convincing power and eloquence. But it is as if you first had to break diamonds inside you, powder them to dust, and then liquefy them — a terrific piece of alchemy. […] You have gotten ingrown, more and more protected, more and more sensitive — and that produces poisons and gems, the clotted, spangled phantasmagoria of neurosis.” Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin, April 20 1933 from A Literate Passion

“Speak for yourself, always. It is lack of confidence. You can say things as well as Dostoevsky, Elie Faure or anybody you quote. Dare to speak for yourself. Let the other people lie in your blood, but faceless, nameless, diluted, masticated by you, reproduced etc. You listen to too many voices. Listen only to yourself. The best parts are yours, not your putting forward of other men.” Anais Nin to Henry Miller, November 8 1933.

(Source: amazon.com)

Etc.

Colophon