We are made of everyone else.

The thing is, everything I do—I have a faint glimmer that it comes from somewhere else, someone else.

[aninafish]

#PoetryAgainstThePlague Derek Walcott's Love after Love

It is easy not to see the true gravity of this poem, it is sweet and deceptively domestic. but it’s a beautiful, sunny day to look forward to. I imagine that with the wine and the bread, there will also be cake.

You can read it here.

What’s really lovely is that I actually got one of my best friend’s to join me read.

And just like I said in the video caption, this may not be an easy time to think of feasting on your life. But it’s always good to have something to look forward to.

Please read a poem out loud, record a video or not. As long as you experience something beautiful.

Be well. Stay safe. We’ll sit across each other soon to share a meal or a long, lingering conversation.

[aninafish]

#PoetryAgainstThePlague Marilyn Hacker's Villanelle

There is something soothing about poetry with a strict meter and rhyme.

Here is Marilyn Hacker’s Villanelle

What a beautiful and difficult poem. Please experience something beautiful today.

Read your own, record your own video. Or just read something to yourself, or to a dog.

Be safe. Be well. I can’t wait to see you after all this.

[aninafish]

#PoetryAgainstThePlague Daryll Delgado and Khavn de la Cruz's Let's Form a Band

I had asked friends right after I started. And was happy to get a song from Daryll (with Khavn!

As always, please record your own or just read to yourself. Just try to experience something beautiful.

Be safe. Be well. See you after all this.

[aninafish]

#PoetryAgainstThePlague And we begin

Two weeks ago, I caught Exie reading a poem on Facebook, and felt that i wanted to do the same. And I have.

Here is my first one. (You can see them on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and IGTV)

You can access the poem here.

Similar to the Valentine’s Day love collection (from which you will also see some of the same poem), please record your own. Or just read poetry out loud, even to yourself, to your dog. There is something about beatiful words in your mouth.

Be safe. Be well. Experience something beautiful.

[aninafish]

This, I recognize.

A gasp, a sharp intake of breath,

the whispered apology, the odd giggle, the relief of laughter

But my name on your lips, every breathless plea

seems new. Music playing from the other room.

Nothing rushing or urgent, even as we search,

we find ourselves, a sigh.

My mouth, your mouth

my body, your skin, the back of your neck

We are mismatched, but offered up 

to each other, utterly.

Here, take me completely. I want all of you

even that which scares me, everything telling me to go

even what you keep in the shadows. I have been 

looking for who you are in the dark, what you 

so carefully shield from view. I consent, close my eyes,

my palms outstretched. I can only touch light.

To my skin, what you hide, is luminous.

To my lips, only glorious light.

But in our plainness, in this everyday union—

everyone talks about the love of a lifetime. Ours, my love, 

is a tenderness of the daily, a mundane vow done for 

an eternity of Mondays.

What I am, it is all for thee. Good morning, 

may I share your life with you today?

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Mucho love from here to wherever you are.

[aninafish]

Ocean Floor

Grief is like waking up

one morning and discovering that

you’re living underwater. Like ocean floor.

You can’t really breathe just yet, but something

is keeping you from downing. But you’re

just there—suffocating to a point. Then

you just go on, learning to do everything again underwater.

Eventually, maybe you grow gills. Sometimes, the sun can

creeps in. Maybe you learn to swim, and maybe

you get closer to the surface. Maybe one day

you climb out of the ocean and walk on dry land.

And the sun is so warm and lovely, you feel

like you just might burst with delight.

But you will always have gills, you will always need the ocean

floor now, even for a while. And even if you eventually go back

to your original color, and even living on land, you will

always feel like the ocean is in you.

All that water.

[aninafish]

Where did you go, Ning?

Nowhere.

Everywhere.

Right here. Always just right here.

Where are you?

[aninafish]

Let my voice take you.

At work, I was reminded just how pleasurable a rhyme can be. One that builds a rhythm, even if they aren’t standing on perfect pairings. But words fit, lines fit and you just glide through an idea.

And that made me crack open a book of poetic forms i have on my desk (flexing my poet/English teacher self I think) hoping that it would get me to write something finally. The thing with poetic forms, especially to the writer who is mostly a reader lately, is that it provides you literal scaffolding so you can form something over what is very little. But as poetry goes, what might be a small idea or thought, when words are asked to perform a certain way, things expand and hopefully, glow.

I ended up on the section on villanelles. There of course was the lovely One Art by Elizabeth Bishop which begins with a most splendid hugot, The art of losing isn’t hard to master. And you join her as she loses keys, homes, cities, and eventually, a you learning to lose farther and faster. And of course, the paragon, Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gently into the Good Night . If you want one more, an old favorite is Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song which I think I will let go because it might haunt me.

But this was what made me write —-

Villanelle for D.G.B. Marilyn Hacker Every day our bodies separate, exploded torn and dazed. Not understanding what we celebrate we grope through languages and hesitate and touch each other, speechless and amazed; and every day our bodies separate us farther from our planned, deliberate ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased, not understanding what we celebrate when our fused limbs and lips communicate the unlettered power we have raised. Every day our bodies' separate routines are harder to perpetuate. In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise, not understanding what we celebrate; wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late morning as the wind tears off the haze, not understanding how we celebrate our bodies. Every day we separate.

——

After reading it silently, please read it out loud. It’s obviously a villanelle (it says so in the title) and you know what lines it is repeating and slightly tweaking. But the way she uses punctuation marks, enjambment — the flow of the villanelle, the rhythm repetition builds is constantly being thwarted. And you stop, as if choked. Especially when she turns and makes the verb separate into an adjective and your breath is drawn out because you are in the middle of a sentence and not the end. And there is a different pleasure to the asymmetry or the way you lose your breath made only richer in your mouth by the images she invokes. Read it again, read it to someone.

And see where you end up.

[aninafish]

A first, yet again.

There are so many reasons not to write here. I’m sleepy. I don’t really have anything to say that is as powerful, as terrifying, as unnerving as so many other things that are going on in the world. I also have a talk I have to prepare for. But where does one start? at the beginning. where there is nothing just yet.

Let me share some other people’s stories first.

I was Caroline Callaway.

It feels so very relevant to what I do for a living, which is still social media! Especially since I realize that writing is still where I breathe and think. If you haven’t read the article or if it hasn’t crossed your feed—

Caroline Callaway is an Instagram influencer. Infamous because she tried to put together Creativity Workshops without realizing just how much work it would entail.

The essay is by her ghostwriter. I think we all know about social media teams, but I guess when your fame (?) is based on your social media presence—a team does seem like a bit of a betrayal. Especially when, like in Calloway’s case, the caption is just as important as the photo. You sort of get the instagram boyfriends or instagram yaya’s, but the caption feels like actual thought. (shade)

I am not really spoiling the article by saying that things don’t end well. But it’s an incredible story through those dynamics + complications of female friendship.

Who Would I Be Without Instagram: An Investigation

Yes another instagram influencer, Tavi Gevenson. She started talking about fashion when she was 11 and eventually started and closed, Rookie. Put badly, Rookie opened up the space for a more politically involved (okay fine, woke) Teen Vogue and the quite confessional but still interesting defunct Lenny Letter. I think the devotion people feel for these publications was how I felt about Jane Magazine.

I think what am liking now, apart from Instagram/Twitter and the odd Tiktok are tinyletter publications. Letters are still more interesting, more intimate.

So let me see, I’ve laid down something. I now have something. Will talk about the modern romances I’ve been reading. And I have a feeling, I’ll probably round back to Bon Appetit.

Maybe that’s my first writerly piece of advice, just start writing then make a plan for the next two entries.

For today’s song, here’s Gallant

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup Day 16: To Live is

My parents used to tell about how they were told not to get married in February, on the 13th no less. But they did. Today I think of them and remember that marriage is such an optimistic act. It’s an expression of complete trust in the world. Even if, even if.  

A Letter

Yehuda Amichai  

To sit on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem

and to write: “Sweetly pass the days from desert to sea.” And to write: “Tears dry quickly here. This blot is a tear that made the ink run.” That’s how they used to write in the last century. “I have drawn a little circle around it.” Time passes, as when someone’s on the phone laughing or crying far away from me: whatever I hear, I can’t see; what I see, I don’t hear. We weren’t careful when we said “Next year” or “A month ago.” Those words are like broken glass: you can hurt yourself with them, even slash an artery, if that’s what you’re like. But you were beautiful as the commentary on an ancient text. The surplus of women in you distant country brought you to me, but another law of probability has taken you away again. To live is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time. And to finish the harbor long after the ship has gone down. And to conclude: I remember only that it was foggy. And if that’s the way you remember¬—— what do you remember?

(emphasis mine) 

we love even if we know it will end. Absurdity. And we learn to cope. 

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 So tonight, before Valentine’s Day, I tell you in all my loneliness and brokenness — love even if you know that we all die. even if even if.  

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup Day 15: This Crazy Little Thing Called Love

I think it is easy to forget how silly and absurd love is. Long live absurdity!

Here are two Wendy Cope poems:

Valentine

My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. Whatever you've got lined up, My heart has made its mind up And if you can't be signed up This year, next year will do. My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you.

Two Cures for Love

1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better.

Both poems by Wendy Cope. Here is a recommendation from Kim, and it’s what was the seed for tonight’s selection.

The Love-Hat Relationship

Aaron Belz

I have been thinking about the love-hat relationship. It is the relationship based on love of one another’s hats. The problem with the love-hat relationship is that it is superficial. You don’t necessarily even know the other person. Also it is too dependent on whether the other person is even wearing the favored hat. We all enjoy hats, but they’re not something to build an entire relationship on. My advice to young people is to like hats but not love them. Try having like-hat relationships with one another. See if you can find something interesting about the personality of the person whose hat you like.

As always, if you would like to contribute a poem or a piece of artwork, please send me an email via [email protected] or send me a private message on Facebook or Twitter.

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup Day 13: I Love You Three Times a Day

You know how you can feel like you own a piece of artwork that doesn’t really belong to you? I feel like I have no boundaries between us. Well, as in most things with me.

It’s Good We Only See Each Other Once a Week

Philip Lopate

It's good we only see each other once a week. A young man about to move in with his fiancée died of a sudden heart attack at twenty-six. One hears these stories all the time. The heart is trained to handle deprivation, not unforeseen happiness. Just as when you throw your arms around me I start to overflow, but then I think of course, where was she before? I deserve it and a lot more besides— your love gets soaked up quickly and I pull back brooding over something I never had. But don't stop on that account, keep going. I was brought up to make the most of accidental brushes with kindness. My pleasures were collected almost unawares from stationary models, like the girl who sat in front of me in tenth grade, who let me stroke and braid her golden hair and never acknowledged it. I wouldn't know what to do with frontal love; would I? One snowy winter night in Montreal I felt so great I danced a flamenco and insisted that everyone call me Fernando. But then I was by myself. And last night, if there are many more nights like last night with you — when I think of all my nights of total happiness I get the panicky sense that the balance has already tipped, and I will never again feel free to pass myself off as a have-not. Maybe it's good we only see each other once a week. But don't stop on that account, keep going.

(highlights are mine.)

I am embarrassingly earnest about love. Case in point, this is one of my favorite love songs. It’s from a short musical. Do watch the whole thing, but the song (it’ll be 11:15.)

If you’d like to contribute anything, please send me an email at [email protected] or holler at me on facebook or twitter.

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup 7: Who Loves You

Admittedly, yesterday’s poem probably shouldn’t have been the last in this series, because you know, tough act to follow. But I took a thread from it and found something. 

 The God Who Loves You

Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you 

To ponder how much happier you’d be today 

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings 

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened 

Had you gone to your second choice for college, 

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted 

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music 

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion. 

A life thirty points above the life you’re living 

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point 

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you. 

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments 

So she can save her empathy for the children. 

And would you want this god to compare your wife 

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? 

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation 

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight 

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel 

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife 

Would have pleased her more than you ever will 

Even on your best days, when you really try. 

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives 

You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him 

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill 

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you 

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene 

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him 

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend 

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight 

And write him about the life you can talk about 

With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed, 

Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

 We’ve all been taught about soulmates, to explain that yearning that disturbs even a good day. But perhaps that yearning is just what it means to be a human, living with the ache or the hollows and knowing that it is part of who you are.

Love, just like happiness and water, takes the shape of that which holds it. And maybe it always leave space for the emptiness to have its place. 

  Maybe that is why books are written, maybe that’s why songs are sung.  

  Though I would be remiss if I don’t point the reframing of God in that poem. Which leads me to one more poem, which I just love because it reminds me that I am easter child even if, even if. 

  God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don't paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

—Kaylin Haugh

[aninafish]

I first heard this from Drey, and it did throw me for a loop. But I kept it and would read it when I could because it makes your breath catch when you say it. Because it is a terrifying request. 

 To Have Without Holding

Marge Piercy 

Learning to love differently is hard,

love with the hands wide open, love

with the doors banging on their hinges,

the cupboard unlocked, the wind

roaring and whimpering in the rooms

rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

that thwack like rubber bands

in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open

stretching the muscles that feel

as if they are made of wet plaster,

then of blunt knives, then

of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes

of grab, of clutch ; to love and let

go again and again. It pesters to remember

the lover who is not in the bed,

to hold back what is owed to the work

that gutters like a candle in a cave

without air, to love consciously,

conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing

me, but you thrive, you glow

on the street like a neon raspberry,

You float and sail, a helium balloon

bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing

on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

as we make and unmake in passionate

diastole and systole the rhythm

of our unbound bonding, to have

and not to hold, to love

with minimized malice, hunger

and anger moment by moment balanced.

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup: Day 3

The first time I read this poem, i did an ugly sob. There’s something about the silliness and teasing tone that makes that last line just catch in your throat. Yes, read this poem out loud. Actually, make sure you read all the poems out loud.  

Love Poem

John Frederick Nims

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases, At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring, Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen, And have no cunning with any soft thing Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people: The refugee uncertain at the door You make at home; deftly you steady The drunk clambering on his undulant floor. Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror, Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars— Misfit in any space. And never on time. A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only With words and people and love you move at ease; In traffic of wit expertly maneuver And keep us, all devotion, at your knees. Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel, Your lipstick grinning on our coat, So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float. Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses— I will study wry music for your sake. For should your hands drop white and empty All the toys of the world would break

Always worth going back to an OG. (may ganon.)

Sonnet 130

William Shakespeare

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

There’s something really truthful and sweet about these two poems.

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup: Day 2

This is actually the poem that made me think that i should just start posting poetry. It’s not necessarily a love poem, but sometimes yeah, everything we write is a love poem. Just like how every love story is a ghost story.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

(emphasis is mine.)

I found this poem through a great love of mine, Chris Abani. Also known as one of the more popular talks on TED.

There was just something about it, something about him talking about how these mere lists of mercantile things could actually be shorthand for someone’s love.

Considering that for much of history, marriage was an exchange of goods — perhaps there is some merit in understanding if you love just as much as a hundred pitchers of honey.

Then again, what do I know?

If you’d like to hear Jack Gilbert read, please click here.

If there’s a love poem, a love song, or work of art that you’d like to share, please send me a private message on FB or Twitter.

[aninafish]

VDay Roundup: Day 3

The first time I read this poem, i did an ugly sob. There’s something about the silliness and teasing tone that makes that last line just catch in your throat. Yes, read this poem out loud. Actually, make sure you read all the poems out loud.  

Love Poem

John Frederick Nims

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases, At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring, Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen, And have no cunning with any soft thing Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people: The refugee uncertain at the door You make at home; deftly you steady The drunk clambering on his undulant floor. Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror, Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars— Misfit in any space. And never on time. A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only With words and people and love you move at ease; In traffic of wit expertly maneuver And keep us, all devotion, at your knees. Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel, Your lipstick grinning on our coat, So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float. Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses— I will study wry music for your sake. For should your hands drop white and empty All the toys of the world would break

Always worth going back to an OG. (may ganon.)

Sonnet 130

William Shakespeare

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

There’s something really truthful and sweet about these two poems.