May 2010
6 posts
2 tags
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*And, breathe out.
This is taken from an interview from Bombsite.com from the Spring of 1995. I’ve been waiting to hear these words from a poet for a long time. * I currently can’t stop reading things by Li-Young Lee.
JL: You subtitled your book as a remembrance and I’m wondering, what are you trying to remember? There is a constant indication of your wife in the book. Was it a personal remembrance...
7 tags
“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird...”
– David Foster Wallace (via misswhiskyandwhimsy) (via awritersruminations, whiskyandwhimsy)
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the...”
– Mark Twain (via deadwriters) (via awritersruminations)
April 2010
3 posts
4 tags
“Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A...”
– Sylvia Plath, Unabridged Journals, pg. 99
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One of my favorite Terrance Hayes poems.
[via qoscar]:
Wind in a Box
Terrance Hayes
I claim in the last hour of this known hysterical breathing, that I have nothing to give but a signature of wind, my typewritten handwriting reconfiguring the past. To the boy with no news of my bound and bountiful kin, I offer twelve loaves of bread. Governed by hunger, he wanted only not to want. What is the future beyond a premonition? What is the...
6 tags
March 2010
11 posts
Three poems by Lucille Clifton
wishes for sons
i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. i wish them no 7-11.
i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late.
later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn’t believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to.
let them think they have accepted arrogance...
Hurricane Season, Sheryl St. Germain
[via poetry365]
1
Those who have already been destroyed recognize its signs: the sky clouds like a glaucous eye, the wind muscles over whatever is weak. Waves swell, engorged with too much of something. A lashing, a swimming of tongues through air. Birds disappear. The smell of ocean in the wrong place, of something diseased, lost fish. The sky bellows, darkens, roars like a drunk.
...
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In the Garden of Eden, Sheryl St. Germain
awritersruminations:
poetry365:
No one tells much about it, but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden, Turkey vultures, to be exact. Dark eagles, they would soar like gods voiceless, their wings held out in blessing, their unfeathered heads the red jewels of the sky of the garden.
They were vegetarian then. There were no roadside kills, no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.
...
“Each birth is a repetitive, boring, dangerous storm.”
– Arthur Vogelsang, Family II
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*Of which, I am absolutely fascinated.
This is from a French poet named Jacques Roubaud who is part of a group called Oulipo.* Their methods involve self-imposed constraints when writing; it’s a bit like working oneself out of a maze to achieve a final product.
It loses some in English, I’m sure, so I’m including the link to the French and English transcripts, as well as a recording in French. [Here] Even if you...
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“I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don’t write from...”
– — Nikki Giovanni [via awritersruminations]
So goddamn true.
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“There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying...”
– David Foster Wallace (via awritersruminations)
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“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are...”
– -Sylvia Plath
(via somethingsomewhere) (via evolutionarily-sweet) (via etherealhazard) (via eatbonesandshitghosts) (via extranuance) (via retrochic) (via awritersruminations)
February 2010
13 posts
4 tags
“I think that thought is very odd.”
– -Brenda Hillman, reading, Los Angeles, 2009
While this was not, by any means, one of my favorite readings I’ve been to, Hillman went on to discuss her fascination with libraries and her take on the “oddness” that they hold within them, that they “catalog.” A unique...
2 tags
http://ewilcox.tumblr.com/post/413681705/poetbabble... →
“I also feel like many people who do experimental art (not just poets, but across the board) have such a disdain for what they see as more “traditional” artists … and it shouldn’t be that way. I mean, I like all sorts of stuff, the “traditional” and the way-out-there. I like writing that makes me think, whether it rhymes, or is fashioned out of...
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“I’m twenty, taking notes as if the world might disappear.”
– Diann Blakely, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, “Antonioni’s Blow-Up”
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Concerning Essential Existence, by Mary Ruefle
The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely and then stopped.
He was profoundly disturbed by a piece of straw.
He was profoundly distracted by the sad toy upside down in the tree.
He was profoundly disengaged by half a cloud in the corner of his wet eye.
And then he continued.
Nothing is forgot by lovers except who they are.
...
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“14.
— This morning I am at a low ebb. I did not sleep well last night,...”
– -Sylvia Plath, Unabridged Journals
[I’m certain everyone can identify this feeling, but it’s one I know to the point of intimacy. There is almost something Lady Macbeth-like about it, perhaps; Lady M’s blood and Plath’s sticky grease are - in a way - distant cousins.]
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“Something in us wants things to happen.”
– Robert Bly, Morning Poems: “All These Stories”
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*This is nebulous, at best.
As of right now, the hesitancy with which I’ve created this account is outweighing the certainty of a creative idea. [*]
I journal. I always have, and probably always will. I have notebooks filled with everything, [ideas, research, lists, essays, commentary, facts] as well as a 10-year running personal journal.
My “idea,” therefore, was to acquire a virtual space in which I...