July 2012
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A Note on the Text, Peter Gizzi
The good poets defy things with their heart This is how a fragment enters the people Don’t say beauty say the beautiful say the people Say it is through chants that writing entered the people Their imagery and love of nature, englutted flowers This place of fleshlessness Here is my song the only recourse of sun Even its smallest syllables can be sown into the mouth It is on the tongue the sun...
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Lot's Wife by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz And the just man trailed God’s shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: “It’s not too late, you can still look back at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and...
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“Talking like touching
Writing like punching somebody
(8/14/73)”
– Susan Sontag
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Dust Lays →
I love this. A 6 page PDF ebook by my friend dialoghost and @viconian and @todaysmessage.
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“THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw...”
– Carl Sandburg (via dirkashlyknoedler)
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“Aidos (“shame”) is a vast word in Greek. Its lexical equivalents include “awe,...”
– Excerpt from the preface Tragedy : A Curious Art Form by Anne Carson to Grief Lessons by Euripides translated by Anne Carson. (via rimeswriting) Wow
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“She took off her clothes like a kite takes gently to a warm April wind. He...”
– Sombrero Fallout, Richard Brautigan (via damnnearhysteria)
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Odd and Full of Love, Adam Clay
Once along this path it was as if God stirred me Between the eyes. My head fell from a cloud To a meadowed land where woodlarks forever search For twigs too heavy to carry. Upon waking, the stulp Where I stood was no more. I witnessed beetles moving Near my face as if for the first time free from the galling glow Of the sun. Larks reappeared. The song of their hungry young Sweetened the air....
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Far Away Lake by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
We can’t get there by road, by rope, by wing by time — though time would be the way by boat by please please time would be the way then the reed-quiver a cloud of gnats mumbling its hypnotic suggestion by sleep, sleep until you say lift my elbow straighten my legs And I straightened you in this life like flowers but the little water there was went to air where it came from And all my...
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from The Constraints of Architecture by Adam Clay
Can’t see the field for the easel. Sometimes the easel Is a mirror and you’re fixing your hair. Sometimes this eddy Of air carries the canvas into the woods, the tongue of a bear In your pocket. Chasing it, you stop and think: “Those trees contain a form I might Someday admire,” “Those torsos Are mighty fine,” or “This bathtub has been the place Of many a...
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Adam Clay, from The Constraints of Architecture
for Megan Welbourne
A longing lives inside the mind: both to be in the past Where we weren’t, but also to be the person We are in the present living in that unrealized past. The moon Is a paint bucket on its side. The moon is the Eye of the camera that records the moment when two bodies touch. She’s spent all night erasing names and details from the love letters, Filling the gaps with origami...
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“and Kabir says
“My heart’s bee drinks its nectar.”
– Kabir: The light of the sun, the moon, and the stars shines bright: translated by Tagore
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You Cannot Rest, Frank Bidart
The trick was to give yourself only to what could not receive what you had to give, leaving you as you wished, free. Still you court the world by enacting yet once more the ecstatic rituals of enthrallment. You cannot rest. The great grounding events in your life (weight lodged past change, like the sweetest, most fantastical myth enshrining yet enslaving promise), the great grounding events that...
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The Yoke, Frank Bidart
don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight
turn your face again toward me
when I hear your voice there is now no direction in which to turn
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
but tonight turn your face again
toward me
see upon my shoulders is the yoke that is not a yoke
don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight
turn your face again
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Winter Spring Summer Fall, Frank Bidart
Like the invisible seasons Which dye then bury all the eye sees, but themselves cannot be seen Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space Inside whatever muck makes words in lines leap into being is the intimation of Like the invisible seasons Process, inside chaos you follow the thread of just one phrase instinct with cycle, archaic Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space Promise that you will...
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Leda and her Swan, Olga Broumas
You have red toenails, hair on your calves, oh let me love you, the fathers are lingering in the background nodding assent. I dream of you shedding calico from slow-motion breasts, I dream of you leaving with skinny women, I dream you know. The fathers are nodding like overdosed lechers, the fathers approve with authority: Persian emperors, ordering that the sun shall rise every dawn, set each...
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In This Light by Matt Hart
nothing and nothing gets by you, but I get so distracted that my notice has been put on notice for birds and for traffic For instance, the constant slap of the sound of waves against gutters gets by me Grass stain on my hands from falling down at the hospital gets by me Physics Sequined dresses The Olympics get by me Meanwhile, the mountains are, so far, only distant, and some days I am even...
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“So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated...”
– Jeanette Winterson, from In Defense of Poetry (via crashinglybeautiful)
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Little Red Riding Hood, Olga Broumas
I grow old, old without you, Mother, landscape of my heart. No child, no daughter between my bones has moved, and passed out screaming, dressed in her mantle of blood as I did once through your pelvic scaffold, stretching it like a wishbone, your tenderest skin strung on its bow and tightened against pain. I slipped out like an arrow, but not before the midwife plunged to her wrist and guided my...
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“say history has ended, say you won”
– Matthew Bliss
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Fragments, Howard Altmann
An old man with a new hat is running out of pride. I want to tell the truth but I don’t know how. The wind is our best pen and it blows poetry out of the water. I wait for days and weeks to enter a feeling that’s had years to leave. The ocean keeps throwing questions it has all the answers to. A candle lights a room and dims the stars. When all that consoled consoles no longer loneliness finds a...
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Offerings by Howard Altmann
To the night I offered a flower and the dark sky accepted it like earth, bedding for light. To the desert I offered an apple and the dunes received it like a mouth, speaking for wind. To the installation I offered a tree and the museum planted it like a man, viewing his place. To the ocean I offered a seed and its body dissolved it like time, composing a life.
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Invented boyfriends for the benefit of advancing taxi drivers. Getting out of the car, but the photograph doesn’t live up to the huge moon.
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“I listened. It was like the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate … no...”
– Joseph Conrad, The Inheritors (via proustitute)
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“There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does...”
– Vladimir Nabokov (via sheaskedforstorms)
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“A lot of misogynist press has taught us to scorn feminism as relegated to the...”
– AnOther Thing I Wanted to Tell You - Antony Hegarty on Future Feminism | AnOther
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I recorded this some time ago to be read on a...
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White Migraine by Michael Dickman
Every color there ever was is white It peels the skin back from the roof of your mouth in metal petals that taste like snow The roof of the world My fingernails floating in milk The moon flushed down a toilet Everything I ever wanted glows in the moonlight Ask him what he wants I want to be sick and white and cough up lilies of the valley * The Matterhorn in my shoulders ruptures in the toilet...
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"that which is sounded out loudly"
Chanting auṃ while sucking cock the pillow of your pelvic bone, my soft hungry mouth if you whip me with liquorice I will breast feed you on rose milk. You are God, that’s why I swallow.
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Calypso drums tickle me and The Knife sing...
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In Pain I Breathe, Rumi
In pain, I breathe easier The scared child is running from the house, screaming. I hear the gentleness. Under nine layers of illusion, whatever the light, on the face of any object, in the ground itself, I see your face. translated by John Moyne & Coleman Barks
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“A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God.”
– The Erotic Philosophers by Carolyn Kizer : The Poetry Foundation
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Duende by Tracy K. Smith
1. The earth is dry and they live wanting. Each with a small reservoir Of furious music heavy in the throat. They drag it out and with nails in their feet Coax the night into being. Brief believing. A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies. And in this night that is not night, Each word is a wish, each phrase A shape their bodies ache to fill— I’m going to braid...
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Winter Song, Carolyn Kizer
So I go on, tediously on and on… We are separated, finally, not by death but life. We cling to the dead, but the living break away. On my birthday, the waxwings arrive in the garden, Strip the trees bare as my barren heart. I put out suet and bread for December birds: Hung from evergreen branches, greasy gray Ornaments for the rites of the winter solstice. How can you and I meet face to face...
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Sleeping Beauty, Olga Broumas
I sleep, I sleep too long, sheer hours hound me, out of bed and into clothes, I wake still later, breathless, heart racing, sleep peeling off like a hairless glutton, momentarily slaked. Cold water shocks me back from the dream. I see lovebites like fossils: something that did exist dreamlike, though dreams have the perfect alibi, no fingerprints, evidence that a mirror could float back in your...
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beloved your word is
holy water, then honey
bathe me, then smear me in it
help me name love
with and without my body
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tentacular:
‘I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.’
Kirsten Kaschock, Sleight
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Love Poem, Gregory Orr
A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.
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To An American God
praxymetry:
You will not turn my people against each other and call it Faith. You will not turn agriculture against the earth and call it Science. We are not sheep. We are hungry.
You will not set fire to the air and sell my daughters nakedness. You will not reveal yourself to my sons and call them wise. We are not fooled. We are weeping.
You will not present me two options and bellow: CHOICE!...
