February 2012
53 posts
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"Visible World" - Richard Siken
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists. You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streamed straight to the bone, as if you were the small room closed in...
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“Do I live in order to write? Or do I write in order to live my life as I do?”
– Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding” (via invisiblestories)
“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books....”
– Cory Doctorow (via atomos)
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“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been...”
– Joan Didion, in her 1976 New York Times article, “Why I Write,” (full PDF), which begins: “Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write… I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because...
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“If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d...”
– Ray Bradbury
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Love After Love by Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take...
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Trying to Have Something Left Over by Jack Gilbert
There was a great tenderness to the sadness when I would go there. She knew how much I loved my wife and that we had no future. We were like casualties helping each other as we waited for the end. Now I wonder if we understood how happy those Danish afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk. Often I took care of the baby while she did housework. Changing him and making him laugh. I would...
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“I don’t know what it is,
But I distrust myself
When I start to like a girl
A...”
– “It’s Raining In Love,” Richard Brautigan (via seafeel)
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“Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty....”
– Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay” (via alinapleskova)
“On mornings when I hope you forget my name,
I walk through the high wet weeds...”
– Dean Young, from “Selected Recent and New Errors” (via proustitute)
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“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul,...”
– Sylvia Plath (via scorpiae)
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Sign Language by Nikky Finney
pudgeybunny:
For the man who jumped out in front of the woman with his arm raised like a machete screaming Abomination! as she walked the streets of San Francisco holding her lover’s hand for the first time in public. There is a woman who goes to sleep every night wishing she had broken your sternum reached up inside your chest momentarily borrowing your heart to hold before your...
“I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was. … I...”
– Former poet laureate Donald Hall on poetry. (via nprfreshair)
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"Dust" by Dorianne Laux
Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor- not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust. And I wasn’t elated or frightened, but simply rapt, aware. ...
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We Are Hard On Each Other | Margaret Atwood
betweenpoems:
i We are hard on each other and call it honesty, choosing our jagged truths with care and aiming them across the neutral table. The things we say are true; it is our crooked aims, our choices turn them criminal. ii Of course your lies are more amusing: you make them new each time. Your truths, painful and boring repeat themselves over & over perhaps because you own so few of...
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“The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes...”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves (via alinapleskova)
“Don’t try to fool the fist that’s tightening right beneath your heart.”
– Ted Berrigan, from “Thin Breast Doom” in Collected Poems (via ahuntersheart)
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“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass...”
– Miranda July
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“Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.”
– Joyce Carol Oates
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